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Objectives-Older adults with mental health problems are especially unlikely to seek professional mental health services. It is not clear, however, whether their help-seeking attitudes and treatment beliefs contribute to this problem. The objectives of this study were to compare older adults' attitudes and beliefs to younger adults' and to examine the influence of age on these variables after controlling for other demographic variables, prior help-seeking, and mental disorders.Methods-We analyzed cross-sectional data from Part II of the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. This dataset includes 5,692 community-dwelling adults, including 1,341 who were 55 years of age and older. Participants responded to three questions assessing attitudes toward seeking professional mental health services and one question examining beliefs about the percentage of people with serious mental health concerns who benefit from professional help. We used logistic regression to predict positive versus negative attitudes and beliefs from age, gender, education, and race/ethnicity, as well as prior help-seeking and mood and/or anxiety disorder diagnosis.Results-Overall, more than 80% of participants exhibited positive help-seeking attitudes and more than 70% reported positive treatment beliefs. In contrast to the modest effect of age on beliefs, adults 55 to 74 years of age were approximately two to three times more likely to report positive helpseeking attitudes than younger adults.Conclusions-Older adults' positive attitudes and treatment beliefs are unlikely barriers to their use of mental health services. This finding, which is consistent with recent positive views of aging, suggests that enabling resources and need factors are more likely explanations for older adults' low rates of mental health service use. Keywordshelp-seeking attitudes; treatment beliefs; mental health service utilization National epidemiologic surveys from Australia (1), Europe (2), and the United States (3) suggest that 12% to 30% of community dwelling individuals have met criteria for a mental disorder in the past year and that 25% to 50% have had one in their lifetimes. In contrast to these high rates of mental health problems, these surveys have also highlighted strikingly low rates of mental health service use, with 65% to 80% of individuals with diagnosable mental health problems not receiving professional help. Despite evidence that mental health service NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript utilization is on the rise, the majority of people with mental disorders still do not receive treatment (3). Furthermore, certain demographic groups, notably older adults, remain especially unlikely to seek professional help (4,5).Considerable attention has been directed to reducing the tremendous gap between the need for and use of mental health services. Mental health commissions in both the United States (6) and Canada (7) were recently created to provide recommendations for improving the mental health systems in thes...

Rats (rattus norvegicus) anticipated the arrival of a food pellet unconditioned stimulus (US) even when the conditioned stimulus (CS) signaled no overall change or a substantial decrease in the overall rate of US occurrence. Pellet USs were scheduled probabilistically in the intertrial interval at either an equivalent rate (Experiment 1) or a four times higher rate (Experiments 2 and 3) than in the CS, which included one fixed-time target US. Conditioning has been said to involve learning "whether" (contingency) the CS signals a change in the US, and if so, "when" (contiguity) the US is scheduled to arrive. Our results suggest that "when" trumps "whether," challenging the received view that a positive CS-US contingency is necessary for successful conditioning.

Higher-than-normal body weight is associated with paranoid, antisocial, and avoidant PDs for women, whereas overweight men have lower rates of paranoid PD and underweight women have higher odds of schizoid PD. Possible clinical implications of this research are discussed.