Recent studies have shown that mindfulness training has a promising potential for smoking treatment. In order to examine the efficacy of mindfulness training in smoking cessation, we performed a systematic review of the literature and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Four randomized controlled trials with 474 patients were included in our analysis. The results showed that 25.2 percent of participants remained abstinent for more than 4 months in the mindfulness group compared to 13.6 percent of those who received usual care therapy (relative risk, 1.88; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.04-3.40). Our results suggest that mindfulness training may have an important role to play in efforts to lower cigarette smoking rates.

This report examines the psychometric integrity of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) subscales, and the differences between them, in a sample of 229 psychiatric patients from 2 community mental health centers (ages 16 to 85). The results verify the overall alpha and split-half reliabilities of the instrument and indicate that greater caution needs to be exercised in clinically evaluating difference scores. Cutoff values presented in the manual appear too low to be of any statistical or diagnostic merit. Distributions for each of the 55 possible difference scores found in this sample are presented and provide a better guide for making nosological determinations.

Psychoanalytically oriented theorists have repeatedly reported observing in patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder severe pathology in the capacity to utilize internalized imagery as a source of self-soothing. Empirical support was provided for this observation: Borderline patients demonstrated a developmentally lower capacity for object representation and evocative memory of affective object relationships, fewer positively toned representations, and a more pervasive experience of aloneness than patients with neurotic character pathology. Moreover, the experience of aloneness was the strongest clinical predictor of diagnosis, supporting the contention that inner emptiness or aloneness may be central to these patients' subjective experience.The psychoanalytic literature is meager in its coverage of the experience of inner emptiness or aloneness. For the most part, the issue is raised tangentially within the context of related subjects. As such, emptiness is viewed from a number of different theoretical perspectives, being seen as: (a) a state of libidinal deficiency (Fairbairn, 1940(Fairbairn, /1952Greenson, 1949), (b) the equivalent of the physiological state of hunger (Rado, 1928), (c) the primary state "before starting to fill up" (Winnicott, 1974, p. 106), (d) a defense against oral incorporative urges which take in the bad mother (Isaacs, 1948), (e) a state resulting Requests for reprints should be sent to