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A questionnaire assessing attitudes toward suicide prevention was constructed and shown to have satisfactory reliability and internal consistency. The determinants and distribution of these attitudes were investigated in four groups of health professionals who are in contact with suicidal patients: general practitioners, accident and emergency nurses, psychiatrists in training, and community psychiatric nurses. Attitudes toward suicide prevention were shown to differ significantly between professional groups. More positive attitudes were associated with mental health professionals, working in the community, and previous training in suicide risk assessment. Negative attitudes should be assessed and targeted in training designed to improve the management of suicide risk.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were employed to investigate whether recognition test items are processed differently according to whether they are used to probe memory for previously studied words or pictures. In each of two study-test blocks, subjects encoded a mixed list of words and pictures, and then performed a recognition memory task with words as the test items. In one block, the requirement was to respond positively to test items corresponding to studied words, and to reject both new items and items corresponding to the studied pictures. In the other block, positive responses were made to test items corresponding to pictures, and items corresponding to words were classified along with the new items. ERPs elicited during the test phase by correctly classified new items differed according to whether words or pictures were the sought-for modality. This finding was interpreted as a neural correlate of the different retrieval orientations adopted when searching memory for words versus pictures. Relative to new items, correctly classified items studied in both target modalities elicited robust, positive-going "old/new" effects. When pictures were targets, test items corresponding to studied words also elicited large effects. By contrast, when words were targets, old/new effects were absent for the items corresponding to studied pictures. These findings were interpreted as evidence that, in some circumstances, adoption of an appropriate retrieval orientation permits retrieval cues to be employed with a high degree of specificity.

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One assumption underlying the use of the exclusion task as part of the process dissociation procedure is that studied items are successfully excluded only when they are recollected. The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to demonstrate that successful exclusion does not necessarily require recollection. In two experiments, the study tasks for to-be-excluded items were identical, but the tasks employed with target items differed, giving better memory for these items in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2. Successfully excluded items elicited the ERP signature for recollection-the left parietal old/new effect-in Experiment 2 only. These findings indicate that the subjects adopted different retrieval strategiesin the two experiments. It is suggested that they made more use of source information about to-be-excluded items in the second experiment than in the first.