Parental capacities for triadic relationships during pregnancy: Early predictors of children's behavioral and representational functioning at preschool age

This study examines associations between parental capacities for triadic (mother–father–child) relationships, assessed prenatally, and the representational and behavioral functioning of their offspring at preschool age. Thirty‐eight parental couples were given an intensive psychodynamic interview during their first pregnancy to assess how they anticipated their future parenthood and their relationships as threesomes (mother–father–child). The capacity for triadic relationships (“triadic capacity”) was defined as the capacity of fathers and mothers to anticipate their family relationships without excluding either themselves or their partners from the relationship with the infant. Four years later, the representational and behavioral functioning of their children were assessed in depth using child narrative interviews and parental behavior ratings. The coherence of the children's narratives and the number of positive themes they expressed were significantly negatively correlated with the number of behavioral problems. In the longitudinal analyses, there were significant positive correlations between the parental triadic capacities and the coherence/number of positive themes in the children's narratives whereas parental triadic capacities showed a significant negative correlation with the number of the children's externalizing problems. The significance of triadic relational family processes for the development of children's representational world and behavioral functioning is discussed. ©2005 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

The ecological approach to perceiving as a foundation for understanding the development of knowing in infancy

The ecological thesis of direct realism is used as a framework for examining the development of knowing in human infancy. When information for perceiving is defined ecologically (i.e., relative to the situational context and to the physical dimensions, capabilities, and needs of the perceiver), knowing need not be construed as the act of using representations to give meaning to acts or percepts. Knowing, alternatively, is the act of noticing affordances, situation and perceiverspecific meanings of objects, according to their value to the perceiver for achieving specific goals. Changes with development in infant sensorimotor functioning may, in this view, be explained by a process of increasing economy in noticing potentially available affordances, rather than a process of constructing a representational system for making present something not present. Studies of three infant skills widely attributed to the onset of representation are examined with regard to this ecological thesis. Results indicate that the noticing of affordances is critically involved in each of these skills.     

Defining the caregiving system: Toward a theory of caregiving

The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary framework for conceptualizing the caregiving behavioral system. Following Bowlby (1982), we propose that caregiving is organized within a goal-corrected behavioral system that is reciprocal to attachment. The set-goal of the system is to keep dependent offspring close or safe; its adaptive function is protection of the young. The caregiving system is designed to provide changing levels and forms of protection depending upon the developmental and individual requirements of the young. However, the evolutionary interests of the parent are not entirely overlapping with that of the child because the parent's evolutionary fitness depends on the fitness of all her offspring. Caregiving is one of several motivational systems in the parent. Depending upon circumstances, parents may select from a range of caregiving strategies, which are believed to correspond to the continuum of child attachment relationships (secure, avoidant, ambivalent). The adult caregiving system is believed to be guided by an internal representation or mental model of caregiving. This system has its roots in early attachment—caregiver experiences, but is distinct from them. We suggest that the caregiving representational system becomes consolidated initially in adolescence and undergoes change during the transition to parenthood and as a function of interaction with the child. Once this development is complete, situations of danger and safety should activate the caregiving behavioral system. Under normal circumstances, if the parent's own attachment system is aroused she would appeal to her own attachment figures rather than to the child. However, situations that engender feelings of helplessness in the mother (i.e., which cause her to perceive herself as unable to protect the child) may disorganize or disable the caregiving system on both the behavioral and representational levels.     

The mind considered as a system of meaning structures II. Concepts and representations

The theory of the mind considered as a system of meaning structures, which was sketched in an earlier paper (Lundh, 1981), is developed further in this paper. Whereas the earlier paper remained at a prelinguistic, sensorimotor level of functioning, the present paper extends the theory to conceptual thinking. Three main distinctions are drawn: between 1) mental representations and symbols, 2) sensorimotor intelligence and conceptual intelligence, and 3) habitual inferences and cognitive operations. Sensorimotor development consists in the development of mental representations, which the child, however, does not yet have any conscious access to. It is argued that sensorimotor structures are transformed into conceptual and propositional structures to the extent that the child becomes able not only to act, but also to think in terms of these structures—the latter is equated with the development of a kind of conscious access to already existent mental representations.     

Predicting the nursing care needs of children in an inpatient psychiatry unit

This study examined factors that could be used in the prediction of nursing care needs of the child or adolescent requesting admission into an inpatient psychiatric unit. Using a time sampling observer methodology, nursing care activities provided to 40 child/adolescent inpatients were recorded and used as estimates of nursing care needs. Results indicated a great deal of variability in the nursing care needs of the inpatients. An encouraging finding of this study was that with relatively little difficulty, information can be obtained that is predictive of the child's or adolescent's nursing care needs. Significant predictive contributions were particularly noted for information pertaining to the sex of the child/adolescent, ratings of intellectual functioning, and history of possible abuse and/or neglect.     

Factors affecting balance,agreement and positivity biases in POQ and POX triads

This review considers experiments which have tested triadic balance in POX and POQ structures. It is pointed out that balance is only one bias which affects subjects' responses to these structures. Of the others the most important are agreement and P/O positivity; these three biases act independently of each other and therefore should be considered as separate influences on subjects' responses. In addition, because they act independently, Newcomb's (1968) theory of interpersonal balance cannot be an adequate explanation of their operation. In an attempt to discover the different influences on balance, agreement, and positivity biases, experiments concerned with balance theory are reviewed in three sections: (1) a classification based on experimental task, (2) a classification based on characteristics of the triad, and (3) personality variables. It is concluded that there are different influences on the different biases, and that any attempt to assess their relative strength must consider the influences upon them. Finally, it is suggested that the view of biases as methods of encoding information about social structures should consider that such methods can be varied by subjects' knowledge or assumptions about that social structure.     

Le consentement du patient aux actes de secours lors d’interventions extrahospitalières

The acquirement of a person's consent to the medical care that is proposed to a patient is an absolute basic principle in rescue health care. This is mandatory for first arrival rescuers ; especially since their actions are, in view of the French Emergency Medical Service call centers, considered as being a medical act. The basic principle of consent to first medical care hence imposes itself as a humanitarian act as well as preventing any potential litigation. Nevertheless there are numerous situations where the management of the consent of the person in need of non-medical assistance will present difficulties. It is the necessary to analyze how the rescue health care system can manage and limit the risks s linked to the different situations when treatment is refused by the person in need of such help ; and this so as to respect the individual's dignity whilst not abandoning the needed health care. A collaboration between rescue personnel and the call center coordinating medical doctor is then mandatory especially when no consent is obtained. This will enable the detection of hypotheses where the individual's lucidity is altered and implement proportionately required and helpful measures. It will also equally enable the transmission of efficient information to the patient, in relation to the matter of patient consent and to ensure that the patient is aware of the consequence of his or her decision and that this decision was fully expressed. It would hence be deemed useful that the referenced work frame and recommendations, pertaining to the emergency rescue of a person, established by the General Management of Public Safety and Crisis Management detail more in detail these difficult and delicate situations so as to ensure that rescue personnel can better anticipate them. To conclude were commend a formalization of procedures that could be implemented in situations where a patient that has full mental capacities refuses the proposed health care, and we give the advantages of such a procedure be discussed.     

Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences,Vol. V Edited by Warner Muensterberger and Sidney Axelrad

In long-term, open-ended psychotherapy groups in which there are inevitable, yet potentially disruptive changes in membership, therapeutic group culture can become particularly important in sustaining a group's sense of cohesion. This article focuses on how transitional phenomena, as defined by D. W. Winnicott, and representational play serve as vehicles for establishing therapeutic group culture in a preadolescent girls' group. Applications of both transitional phenomena and therapeutic group culture to group stage development, as outlined by Garland, Jones, and Kolodny (1970), will also be explored.     

Parental and professional views of the needs of families with a child with severe physical disability

The study examined parents' and paediatricians' views of the prevalence of needs for help in a number of different areas related to child and family functioning. Twenty-four paediatricians estimated the percentage of families who would need help in each area and their estimates were compared with data from 107 parents who responded about their own needs. Parents and paediatricians largely agreed on the areas of greatest need but in other areas paediatricians tended to overestimate the negative impact of the child on the family and parents' needs for help in teaching the child. Paediatricians with more years experience were likely to be more accurate in their estimates, as were those who placed greater emphasis on giving information about other services to parents and the importance of their own continued involvement with the family. Results are discussed in relation to their implications for parent-professional partnership, the need for more emphasis on communication skills in medical training and the importance of individualized assessment of family needs.     

On regression and supervision

The centrality of the supervisory relationship to the professional development of supervisees may encourage dependency needs and regressive wishes. This process may undermine the delicate balance in supervision between an optimal didactic tension and an atmosphere of calmness and security. The present paper advises supervisors to take into account the gap in power and interests between their supervisees and themselves, and the temptation that may arise within them to use their supervisees' regression in order to avoid resistance. Such awareness will help them make controlled and appropriate use of such analytic powers and maintain the balance between supervisees' “regressive selves” and “mature selves.” In addition, a perception of supervisory relations as a space of mutual alternating regressive states is offered as an important aspect of supervisor–supervisee communication.     

The Roles of Emotional Comprehension and Representational Drawing Skill in Children's Expressive Drawing

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children's expressive drawing. Fifty 7‐ to 10‐year‐olds were asked to produce two (happy and sad) expressive drawings, two representational drawings (drawing of a man running and drawing of a house) and to answer the Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons & Harris, 2000). The expressive drawings were assessed on the number of expressive subject matter themes (‘content expression’) and the overall quality of expression on a 5‐point scale. Each of the representational drawings was measured on a scale assessing detail and visual realism criteria, and contributed to a single representational drawing skill score. In line with our predictions, we found that both emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill accounted for a significant variance in children's expressive drawings. We explain that children's developing emotional comprehension may allow them to consider more detailed and poignant expressive ideas for their drawings and that their developing representational drawing skill facilitates the graphic execution of these emotional ideas. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Parent–Child Interactional Model of Social Anxiety Disorder in Youth

In this paper, one of the most common disorders of childhood and adolescence, social anxiety disorder (SAD), is examined to illustrate the complex and delicate interplay between parent and child factors that can result in normal development gone awry. Our parent–child model of SAD posits a host of variables that converge to occasion the onset and maintenance of this disorder. Specifically, five risk factors—temperamental characteristics of the child, parental anxiety, attachment processes in the parent–child dyad, information processing biases, and parenting practices—will be highlighted. While it is acknowledged that other factors including genetic influences and peer relationships may also be important, they are simply not the focus of this paper. Within these constraints, the implications of our parent–child interaction model for prevention, treatment, research, and practice will be explored.     

An Approach to Examining the Proximal and Intermediate Outcomes of an Intensive Family Preservation Program

This study examined the effects of the Boys Town In-Home Family Program (BT-IHFP) on parenting skills, family functioning, and child behavior for at-risk families involved with child protective services. The BT-IHFP is designed as a home-based, family-centered alternative to out-of-home placement with the goal of improving family functioning, keeping families together, and preventing further involvement with child protective services. The model uses a hands-on cognitive-behavioral approach, promotes family engagement, provides 24/7 services to families, and links families to community resources. While it is essential to examine ultimate, long-term outcomes such as family preservation, it is also important to investigate the proximal and intermediate outcomes that address the key changes in behavior that support successful long-term outcomes. The goals of this study were to (1) examine the pre-post change of proximal and intermediate outcomes and (2) examine if improvements in parenting skills, parental roles, and parental stress (proximal outcomes) will be related to improvements in child behavior at home, child behavior at school, and family functioning (intermediate outcomes). Inspecting intake and discharge data for 44 families, 94% were intact at discharge and significant pre-post improvements were found in proximal and intermediate outcomes. These findings suggest that this six-week intensive BT-IHFP holds promise for teaching at-risk families skills to promote positive family functioning.     

Stochastic approaches to understanding dissociations in inflectional morphology

Computer modelling research has undermined the view that double dissociations in behaviour are sufficient to infer separability in the cognitive mechanisms underlying those behaviours. However, all these models employ multi-modal representational schemes, where functional specialisation of processing emerges from the training process. Targeted lesioning of different regions of functional specialisation leads to varied but predictable deficits in model performance. We argue that multi-modal representational schemes are not a necessary condition for the observation of double dissociations in an information processing system that shares resources across multiple tasks. Using a uni-modal representational system, we demonstrate that double dissociations may also result from stochastic processes. Lesioning experiments on a single-route, uni-modal connectionist model of regular and irregular noun and verb morphology confirm and extend earlier work demonstrating that selective impairment across tasks can result from damage to a distributed information processing system. A systematic investigation of the degree to which performance deteriorates across different inflectional classes reveals that simple and double dissociations can occur in this single-route, uni-modal model. An important prediction of the model is that double dissociations between regular and irregular inflection, resulting from stochastic processes should be extremely rare. However, they are particularly likely to occur when the researcher uses test batteries consisting of a small number of items. Given that cognitive neuropsychologists rarely provide details about the distribution of performance in a disordered population, it is concluded that a stochastic interpretation of double dissociations may have wider applicability than is normally supposed.     

Social learning in the digital age: Associations between technoference,mother-child attachment,and child social skills

Technoference refers to incidents in which technology use interferes with interpersonal exchanges (e.g., conversations, playing). Although research on technoference is in its infancy, there is preliminary evidence that mothers believe technoference has a detrimental impact on the social-emotional functioning of their child. The current study investigated the degree to which technoference was associated with attachment between mothers and their elementary-aged children. A second aim was to determine if the relationship between technoference and children's social-emotional functioning may be moderated by mother-child attachment. Surveys were completed by a sample of 80 mothers and their elementary-aged children. This study is unique in asking elementary-aged children to report their perceptions of parental technoference and the impact it has on their relationship with their mother and their own social-emotional functioning. More frequent technoference was associated with less secure mother-child attachment as rated by children, but not as rated by mothers. That is, frequent technoference may not significantly influence a mother's attachment to their child, but it is associated with a child's attachment to their mother. More frequent technoference was associated with decreased ratings by mothers regarding their child's social-emotional functioning. Furthermore, maternal attachment moderated the relationship between technoference and child externalizing behaviors, such that a more secure attachment served as a protective factor against the negative impact of technoference on child externalizing behaviors. However, attachment did not moderate the relationship between technoference and most social skills assessed in our study. Implications from this study are discussed, including ways to increase awareness of technoference among school personnel, parents, and youth.     

Predictors of representational aggression in preschool children of low‐income urban African American adolescent mothers

Responses to five doll‐story stems thematically related to attachment experiences with the mother were videotaped in the home and used to evaluate child, maternal, and environmental predictors of representational aggression in 93 preschool children of African American women receiving public assistance who had become pregnant as teenagers. Significant correlations were found between representational aggression and child's gender (male), birth weight, maternal depressive affect, maternal educational attainment, recent employment, mother's historical residence with her own mother, and felt social support, accounting for 40% of the variance in representational aggression. A significant Felt Social Support × Gender interaction effect suggested that girls of mothers who perceive higher levels of felt social support are more likely to represent less aggression in their stories; felt social support was not associated with boys' representational aggression. A significant Felt Social Support × Employment interaction effect suggested that representational aggression is associated with lower levels of felt social support only among employed mothers. Findings suggest that different pathways exist for representational aggression in children of low‐income adolescent mothers, which nevertheless share predictors associated with poverty.     

Correspondence in parents' and children's concepts of god: Investigating the role of parental values,religious practices and executive functioning

This study examined the extent to which children's concepts of God correspond with their parents' concepts of God. It also examined how parent-context factors and children's executive functioning relate to parent–child conceptual similarity. Parent–child dyads from varied religious and racial backgrounds participated. Dyads had the greatest conceptual similarity concerning God's mind-dependent functions. Though correspondence between parents and children was lowest concerning God's body-dependent functions, dyads were more similar about those functions when parents engaged in more frequent religious practices with their child and thought God was important. Children's concepts of God were unrelated to religious practices, and parent–child conceptual similarity was unrelated to children's age and executive functioning. Simply put, variation among parents' anthropomorphic concepts of God drove variation in parent–child conceptual similarity. Overall, these findings suggest that embodied concepts of God may be most sensitive to cultural input and that socialization practices provide greater insight into parents' anthropomorphic concepts.     

Co‐development of child‐mother gestures over the second and the third years

This study looks at whether there is a relationship between mother and infant gesture production. Specifically, it addresses the extent of articulation in the maternal gesture repertoire and how closely it supports the infant production of gestures. Eight Spanish mothers and their 1‐ and 2‐year‐old babies were studied during 1 year of observations. Maternal and child verbal production, gestures and actions were recorded at their homes on five occasions while performing daily routines. Results indicated that mother and child deictic gestures (pointing and instrumental) and representational gestures (symbolic and social) were very similar at each age group and did not decline across groups. Overall, deictic gestures were more frequent than representational gestures. Maternal adaptation to developmental changes is specific for gesturing but not for acting. Maternal and child speech were related positively to mother and child pointing and representational gestures, and negatively to mother and child instrumental gestures. Mother and child instrumental gestures were positively related to action production, after maternal and child speech was partialled out. Thus, language plays an important role for dyadic communicative activities (gesture–gesture relations) but not for dyadic motor activities (gesture–action relations). Finally, a comparison of the growth curves across sessions showed a closer correspondence for mother–child deictic gestures than for representational gestures. Overall, the results point to the existence of an articulated maternal gesture input that closely supports the child gesture production. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.