Poster presentations

We analysed the organisation of semantic network using associative mechanisms between different types of information and studied the progression of the use of these associative relations during development. We aimed to verify the linkage of concepts with the use of semantic associative relations. The goal of this study was to analyse the cognitive ability to use associative relations between various items when describing old and/or new concepts. We examined the performance of 100 subjects between the ages of 4 and 7 years on an experimental task using five associative relations based on verbal encoding. The results showed that children are able to use the five semantic associative relations at age 4, but performance with each of the different associative relations improves at different times during development. Functional and part/whole relations develop at an early age, whereas the superordinate relations develop later. Our study clarified the characteristics of the progression of semantic associations during development as well as the roles that associative relations play in the structure and improvement of the semantic store.     

Poster presentations

Abstracts

Poster presentations     

Assessing Client Progress Session by Session in the Treatment of Social Anxiety Disorder: The Social Anxiety Session Change Index

Frequent assessment during therapy can improve treatments and provide accountability. However, clinicians often do not monitor progress because of the time it takes to administer and score assessments. In response, the Social Anxiety Session Change Index (SASCI) was developed. The SASCI is a short, easily administered rating of subjective improvement that asks clients with social anxiety disorder how much they have changed since the beginning of therapy. Change on the SASCI was related to change in fear of negative evaluation, a core aspect of social anxiety, and to clinician-rated improvement, but not to ratings of anxiety sensitivity or depression. Because it is brief and easily interpretable, the SASCI can be used in a variety of clinical settings to monitor change across therapy. The SASCI is presented along with examples of how the information gathered from frequent administration can inform clinical practice.     

The Pleasure of Thought during the Session

The pleasure of thought during the session is an intellectual feeling, that can take several forms at different moments during the analyst's thought process. The following should be distinguished: the disruption introduced by interpretative interference, which by underlining an unconscious element, upsets the conscious logical flow of the analysand's speech; finding the key-word or the overdetermined image which springs to the mind in the same way as a poet finds a rhyme; the resurgence of a memory, once evoked and subsequently forgotten again by the analysand, which imposes itself with quasi hallucinatory sharpness in the analyst's representative space; the experience of co-thought, either on one particular occasion related to a specific representation, or as a complement, accompanying the analysand's associative process.