This pilot study examined the effects of a manualized meditation intervention (called Inner Resources) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety symptoms among 20 African American and Caucasian mental health workers in New Orleans beginning 10 weeks after Hurricane Katrina. They participated in a 4-hour workshop followed by an 8-week home study program. Complete follow-up data were available for 15 participants. Results of intention-to-treat analyses indicated that participants' PTSD and anxiety symptoms significantly decreased over the 8 weeks of the intervention; these improvements were significantly correlated with the total number of minutes of daily meditation practice. The majority of participants reported good treatment adherence and improvements in well-being. These findings suggest that meditation may be a feasible, acceptable, and effective postdisaster intervention.
This article describes the development and preliminary validation of the Race-Related Events Scale (RES). The RES is a brief screening measure used to assess exposure to stressful and potentially traumatizing experiences of race-related stress and was designed to be both consistent with standard diagnostic definitions of traumatic events and applicable to diverse ethnic groups. Its psychometric properties were assessed in an ethnically diverse sample of undergraduate students (N ϭ 408). The measure showed good internal consistency (␣ ϭ .86) and adequate 1-month test-retest reliability (r s ϭ .66). Its validity was supported by findings that Whites reported significantly less race-related stress than other ethnic groups and African Americans reported significantly more race-related stress than Asian Americans. A subset of participants who reported ongoing distress following a race-related stressor (n ϭ 91) also completed posttraumatic stress disorder measures. Close to one-third of these participants reported a race-related stressor involving exposure to threat of injury or death to self or others and almost half reported fear, helplessness, or horror during a race-related stressor. Participants who met these DSM-IV-TR criteria for trauma exposure reported significantly more race-related stressors and more severe posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Greater exposure to race-related stressors was associated with more severe posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms among ethnic minority but not White respondents. These findings suggest that the RES is a useful screening measure of potentially traumatizing race-related experiences across diverse ethnic groups.
These data are among the first to suggest that measures of prefrontal brain activation during executive functioning predict response to CBT in older adults. Further exploration of the specific underlying processes that these prefrontal cortical regions are engaging that contributes to better CBT outcomes is warranted in larger, randomized studies.
Previous studies suggest that individuals with elevated levels of cortisol (the “stress hormone”) could be particularly resistant to treatment for depression. However, most of these studies have been conducted in the context of antidepressant medications, and no study has examined pretreatment cortisol levels as a predictor of treatment outcomes among older adults with depression in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), despite the relevance of this population for such a research question. The current study includes 54 older adults with depression who provided salivary cortisol samples at baseline and completed measures of depression at pretreatment and posttreatment, following a 12-week course of CBT. Structural equation modeling results suggest that those with higher daily outputs of cortisol and flatter diurnal slopes were less likely to benefit from CBT—a finding which if replicated could have important implications for clinical practice and future research.
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