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A novel anti-cocaine vaccine has been successfully tested in primates, suggesting that human clinical trials are not far off, according to new research by Weill Cornell Medical College...

Suicide rates have fallen among farmers Among the various risk factors for suicide, psychologists have recognised for some time that a person's occupation plays an important part. Suicide rates have tended to be unusually high in professions that provide ready access to guns, drugs, or open water, such as in farming, medicine, dentistry and maritime careers.

A new analysis has examined whether this still holds true. Stephen Roberts and his colleagues accessed the UK suicide rates for dozens of occupations in 1979 to 1983 and compared these with similar data recorded between 2001 and 2005.

Consistent with the ready access theory, vets, pharmacists, dentists, doctors, and farmers were all among the top 15 occupations with the highest suicide rates back in the late 70s, early 80s. But this had all changed when looking at the more recent data. In the early noughties, none of these professions were in the top 30 occupations in terms of suicide rates. Instead, the occupations with the highest rates of suicide were largely manual, including coal miners, builders, window cleaners, plasterers and refuse collectors.

Stated differently, of 55 high-risk occupations, 14 had shown reductions in suicide rate in the noughties compared with the late seventies, and these were almost exclusively highly educated professional roles like doctors, radiographers and judges, as well as farmers, actors and authors. In contrast, five of the 55 high-risk professions showed an increased rate of suicide in the later data, and these were exclusively manual professions - coal miners, labourers, plasterers, fork-lift drivers and carpenters.

The new findings are published at a time when arguments are raging over the relative prominence that should be given to biological or social explanations of mental illness.

According to this new analysis, socio-economic forces appear to have become an increasingly major factor in occupational suicide risk. The percentage of variation in suicide rates explained by an occupation's socioeconomic grouping (e.g. managerial, trade, admin etc) almost doubled from 11.4 per cent in the early data to 20.7 per cent in the early noughties. Bear in mind these figures were from before the recession, so if anything it seems likely this trend will have intensified in more recent years.

The data also showed that suicide rates were much higher among men than women, and that among men, the most at-risk occupations tended to be manual, whereas in women they were more often (non-manual) professional.

If the pattern of these results are replicated in other European and Western countries, the researchers said this "could help in developing new suicide prevention interventions that can be targeted at specific occupational groups."

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Roberts, S., Jaremin, B., and Lloyd, K. (2013). High-risk occupations for suicide Psychological Medicine, 43 (06), 1231-1240 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712002024

--Further reading--
More Digest reports on suicide.
Men, suicide and society - why disadvantaged men in mid-life die by suicide (Samaritans report).

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Research conducted by Xiao-Cheng Wu, MD, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of the Louisiana Tumor Registry at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health, and colleagues, reports adolescents and young adults with cancer may be at higher risk for social isolation and that a substantial proportion of them have unmet social needs that could adversely affect their health...

Women who engage in "fat talk" - the self-disparaging remarks girls and women make in relation to eating, exercise or their bodies - are less liked by their peers, a new study from the University of Notre Dame finds...

Frontiers in Physiology Flexible echolocation behavior of fishing bats during natural hunting situations It has been known for some time that fishing bats use echolocation to detect and classify acoustical cues from insects along and above water surfaces, and also to detect small water-dwelling prey breaking the water surface for a very short time...

Men who experience high levels of sexual harassment are much more likely than women to induce vomiting and take laxatives and diuretics in an attempt to control their weight, according to a surprising finding by Michigan State University researchers. Their study is one of the first to examine the effects of sexual harassment on body image and eating behaviors in both women and men...

More than 80 per cent of youth who die by suicide had some form of contact with the health care system in the year before their death, according to a new study from St. Michael's Hospital. "This suggests there are a lot of opportunities for prevention," said Dr. Anne Rhodes, a research scientist at the hospital's Suicide Studies Research Unit...

Different brain areas are activated when we choose to suppress an emotion, compared to when we are instructed to inhibit an emotion, according a new study from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Ghent University...

People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science...

The offspring of parents who were addicted to drugs or alcohol are more likely to be depressed in adulthood, according to a new study by University of Toronto researchers...

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. Love this - "Neuroscience may be sexier than psychology right now, and it certainly has a lot more money and celebrity. But they really cannot get along without each other." Alison Gopnik in the Wall Street Journal on How The Brain Really Works.

2. New Scientist has started a new column written by people with "mysterious neurological conditions". The first is by Heather Sellers who has a severe form of prosopagnosia (AKA face blindness).

3. There's been lots of coverage this last week about NIMH director Thomas R. Insel's announcement that his organisation - the world's largest funder of mental health research - will be moving away from US psychiatry's DSM categories, just as the profession is about to publish the latest version of its diagnostic manual. My favourite round-up of the affair was by Christopher Lane for Psychology Today. Other bloggers pointed out that the big news isn't really that surprising at all. (also, check out this measured response from the chair of DSM5).

4. "Probably the most boring book in the world" - that's how Prof Sir Simon Wesseley described the DSM on the latest edition of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind as he told presenter Claudia Hammond that the diagnostic code really isn't that relevant here in the UK. The programme also covered recent research that looked at rates of crying by therapists in therapy (check out my coverage of the research earlier this year).

5. The Guardian covered the psychological tricks that restaurant menu-compilers use to influence your dinner order.

6. Newly posted TED talk by positive psychology researcher Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit.

7. A new play on tour in the UK "Mess" sets out to demystify anorexia and it's getting rave reviews. It's written by and stars Caroline Horton, who has first-hand experience of the condition. (There's also a new book out soon about anorexia: Ministry of Thin, How the Pursuit of Perfection Got Out of Control).

8. I enjoyed this charming account of the decades-long research relationship between Suzanne Corkin and amnesiac Henry Molaison. (Corkin's new book about Molaison is out now in hardback and Kindle).

9. Nathan Azrin, the psychologist who pioneered the use of "token economies" on psychiatric wards has died aged 82. "It would be difficult to name a population that wasn’t affected by his work," said Alan Kazdin in this NYT obituary.

10. Bad news for "Tiger" parenting enthusiasts - "Children of parents ... classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement and attainment—and greater psychological maladjustment—and family alienation, than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or "easygoing.”

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Looking ahead to the weekend and beyond. There's a workshop this Saturday and Sunday in London on Havening Therapy, which promises to cure trauma in minutes. Here's why I won't be going. Later in the week in Oxford, there are still tickets available for three Pint of Science brain-related events.

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

A new, multinational randomized clinical trial has found that patients with severe and enduring anorexia nervosa will not only stick with treatments but also make significant improvements with just a slight modification of the standard goals and methods of treatment. More than 85 percent of those who enrolled in the trial completed treatment - almost three times the usual retention rate...

Breast cancer patients who say they have people with whom they have a good time, or have "positive social interactions" with, are better able to deal with pain and other physical symptoms, according to a new Kaiser Permanente study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment...

A laugh may signal mockery, humor, joy or simply be a response to tickling, but each kind of laughter conveys a wealth of auditory and social information...

When we hear someone laughing because they are being tickled, the connections in our brains respond differently than when we hear social laughter, such as that which expresses joy or accompanies mocking behavior...

The Greek Stoic Epictetus wrote that "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them." A new study involving 185 children and teenagers, 88 fathers and 97 mothers shows how this same principle applies to children's fear of the dentist. This is an important topic because many children avoid the dentist out of fear, and around half of dentally anxious adults trace their fears to childhood.

Antonio Crego and his colleagues assessed the children's fear of the dentist, any bad experiences they'd had, their personality, their relatives' fear and, most importantly for this study, their "cognitive vulnerability". This last measure looked at how much the children had feelings of uncontrollability (e.g. feeling trapped), unpredictability (not knowing what will happen), dangerousness (expecting pain) and disgustingness (expecting it to turn their stomach) about a visit to the dentist. The mothers and fathers answered the same questionnaires.

As you'd expect, all the non-cognitive factors were associated with the children's dental fear. So having a bad experience, having a more fearful temperament and having fearful parents were all associated with being more scared of the dentist. But none of these were as strongly related to the children's fear as their cognitive vulnerability, which explained an additional 20 per cent of variation in fear levels.

Particularly striking was the finding that a bad experience was no longer associated with children's dental fear once cognitive vulnerability was taken into account. The implication is that a bad experience only leads children to fear the dentist if it increases their feelings of uncontrollability, dangerousness and so forth. Of the various components of children's cognitive vulnerability, it was perceived disgustingness that was most strongly related to their fear of the dentist.

Another finding was an association between children's cognitive vulnerability and their parents' cognitive vulnerability. Although there's no proof here that the parents are passing their thinking style onto their children, the researchers said this could reflect a kind of "cognitive transfer" among family members. This suggests that interventions aimed at reassuring children may need to target parents too.

Some further curiosities - the dental fear of children younger than 13 was more closely associated with their father's fear; for teenagers over 13, their fear was tied more with their mother's fear. Overall, cognitive vulnerability was more strongly associated with dental fear in teenagers, perhaps because of their increasingly mature thought processes.

Crego and his colleagues said their "cognitive approach may help explain why some children develop dental fear problems after suffering a negative dental experience and how dental anxiety is passed from parents to children."

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Crego, A., Carrillo-Diaz, M., Armfield, J., and Romero, M. (2013). Applying the Cognitive Vulnerability Model to the analysis of cognitive and family influences on children's dental fear. European Journal of Oral Sciences DOI: 10.1111/eos.12041

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Vertebrates are predisposed to act to gain rewards, and to lay low to avoid punishment. Try to teach chickens to back away from food in order to obtain it, and you'll fail, as researchers did in 1986. But (some) humans are better thinkers than chickens...

Working on a team is always a challenge, but a new study highlights a particular challenge to women: how much they credit themselves in a joint success. Women will devalue their contributions when working with men but not with other women, according to the new research. The study suggests yet another reason why women still tend to be under-represented at the highest echelons of many organizations...

Some memory problems common to older adults may stem from an inability to segment daily life into discrete experiences, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science...

Vertebrates are predisposed to act to gain rewards, and to lay low to avoid punishment. Try to teach chickens to back away from food in order to obtain it, and you'll fail, as researchers did in 1986. But (some) humans are better thinkers than chickens...