PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

J A Gergen

Publications and source records attributed to J A Gergen.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

Right-posterior face processing anomaly in depression.

Evidence of a right-posterior brain anomaly was found in a study of 19 individuals with major depression and 15 controls. Participants performed a recognition-memory task involving positive, neutral, and negative face and word stimuli. Scalp brain wave topography suggested a region-specific anomaly in the depressed group. Individuals with major depression demonstrated a reduction in the N200 component of the event-related brain potential to faces and not words. Furthermore, results indicate that the regional anomaly is specific to positive facial stimuli. Findings are interpreted in light of a model of regional brain specialization in emotion and psychopathology.

Adult↗

Neuropsychological differentiation of depression and anxiety.

The high comorbidity of depression and anxiety is well established empirically but not well understood conceptually, in terms of either psychological or biological mechanisms. A neuropsychological model of regional brain activity in emotion provides contrasting hypotheses for depression and anxiety, with depression associated with a relative decrease and anxiety with a relative increase in right-posterior activity. These hypotheses received support in a comparison of individuals diagnosed with depression and community controls, and also in a separate study of nonpatients administered a measure of perceptual asymmetry. Hierarchical regressions revealed that depression and anxiety were uniquely and jointly associated with perceptual asymmetry. In light of consistent empirical support for the model, implications for conceptualizations of the comorbidity of depression and anxiety are discussed.

Adult↗

Current procedural terminology codes for psychiatric services.

Physicians' Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) is the system most commonly recognized by third-party payers for describing medical services in numerical codes for subsequent reimbursement. Adequate description of psychiatric services using CPT codes is an ongoing challenge. Psychiatrists have responded to the demands of third-party payers and peer review organizations for documentation and accountability by billing for specific services rather than by designating all care as psychotherapy. The authors present guidelines for using CPT codes to describe inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services and consultation. They also discuss continuing controversies, including regional diversity in the interpretation of codes by third-party payers, the risks of "gaming" the coding process, and the use of CPT codes by non-physician providers and the consequent mixing of data on service charges.

Abstracting and Indexing↗