Computer‐Aided Psychotherapy for Anxiety Disorders: A Meta‐Analytic Review

Computer‐aided psychotherapy (CP) is said to (1) be as effective as face‐to‐face psychotherapy, while requiring less therapist time, for anxiety disorder sufferers, (2) speed access to care, and (3) save traveling time. CP may be delivered on stand‐alone or Internet‐linked computers, palmtop computers, phone‐interactive voice response, DVDs, and cell phones. The authors performed a meta‐analysis of 23 randomised controlled studies (RCTs) that compared CP with non‐CP in anxiety disorders: phobias, n = 10; panic disorder/agoraphobia, n = 9; PTSD, n = 3; obsessive–compulsive disorder, n = 1. Overall mean effect size of CP compared with non‐CP was 1.08 (95% confidence interval: 0.84–1.32). CP and face‐to‐face psychotherapy did not differ significantly from each other (13 comparisons, d = ?0.06). Much caution is needed when interpreting the findings indicating that outcome was unrelated to type of disorder, type of comparison group, mode of CP delivery (Internet, stand‐alone PC, palmtop), and recency of the CP system and that effect size decreased when more therapist time was replaced by the computer. Because CP as a whole was as effective as face‐to‐face psychotherapy, certain forms of CP deserve to be integrated into routine practice.     

ON THE BIRTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD THEORY,PART 1

Defining Psychoanalysis: Achieving a Vernacular Expression, by Ian Miller. London: Karnac, 2016. 116 pp. The Pioneers of Psychoanalysis in South America: An Essential Guide, edited by Nydia Lisman‐Pieczanski and Alberto Pieczanski. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. 537 pp. Reading Italian Psychoanalysis, edited by Franco Borgogno, Alberto Luchetti, and Luisa Marino Coe. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. 738 pp.     

Eliciting donations to disaster victims: Psychological considerations

Predictors of monetary donations to victims of humanitarian disasters were examined. Participants (N = 219) chose between donating to different scenarios and justified their choices in an open response format. This was followed by a questionnaire. The perceived extent of the victims’ Need, the Impact of a potential donation, and the Amount donated by others all influenced donation decisions. There was a three‐way interaction between these factors: The perceived Need for help only mattered if the perceived Impact of a donation was high, and the perceived Amount donated by others was small. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

POST‐BIONIAN DEVELOPMENTS IN PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD THEORY: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ANTONINO FERRO AND GIUSEPPE CIVITARESE

The Bi‐Personal Field: Experiences in Child Psychoanalysis. By Antonino Ferro. New York: Routledge, 1992 (1999). 232 pp. The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field. By Giuseppe Civitarese. New York: Routledge, 2008 (2010). 240 pp. The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. By Giuseppe Civitarese; translated by Ian Harvey. London: Karnac, 2013 (2014). 246 pp. The Analytic Field and Its Transformations. By Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese. London: Karnac, 2015. 224 pp.     

Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons,Adventists, and Witnesses

Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses have all felt called to take their teachings to the world and have experienced growth. However, they have varied considerably in both their geographic spread—where they have developed a presence over time—and also in where they have been more successful numerically. The result is sharply differing profiles: Adventists are concentrated more in the developing world; Witnesses and Mormons are proportionately stronger in the developed world, but in different parts of it. Within countries, Witnesses and Mormons are more urban, while Adventists are more concentrated in rural regions; Adventists also tend to be poorer than Witnesses and especially practicing Mormons. The article explores why these differing patterns developed, expanding on a recently developed theoretical model by Cragun and Lawson that religious growth depends on the synchronization of supply and demand and their corresponding components.     

FROM EXTENSION TO REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE RADICAL INFLUENCE OF BION AND WINNICOTT

This paper addresses the radical departure of late Bion's and Winnicott's clinical ideas and practices from traditional psychoanalytic work, introducing a revolutionary change in clinical psychoanalysis. The profound significance and implications of their thinking are explored, and in particular Bion's conception of transformation in O and Winnicott's clinical‐technical revision of analytic work, with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients. The author specifically connects the unknown and unknowable emotional reality‐O with unthinkable breakdown (Winnicott) and catastrophe (Bion). The author suggests that the revolutionary approach introduced by the clinical thinking of late Bion and Winnicott be termed quantum psychoanalysis. She thinks that this approach can coexist with classical psychoanalysis in the same way that classical physics coexists with quantum physics.     

FINDING THE SOMETHING IN NOTHING

Formless Infinity: Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion. By Riccardo Lombardi. Translated by Karen Christenfeld, Gina Atkinson, Andrea Sabbadini, and Philip Slotkin. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. 282 pp.     

Inference and the taking condition

It has recently been argued that inference essentially involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion and drawing his conclusion because of this fact. However, this Taking Condition has also been criticized: If taking is interpreted as believing, it seems to lead to a vicious regress and to overintellectualize the act of inferring. In this paper, I examine and reject various attempts to salvage the Taking Condition, either by interpreting inferring as a kind of rule‐following, or by finding an innocuous role for the taking‐belief. Finally, I propose an alternative account of taking, according to which it is not a separate belief, but rather an aspect of the attitude of believing: Believing that p implies not only taking p to be true and taking oneself to believe that p, but also taking one's reasons q to support p, when the belief in question is held on account of an inference.     

Differentiating Cognitive Content between Depressed and Anxious Outpatients

Quantitative research suggests that depressed and anxious patients can be differentiated based on their cognitive content. This study used qualitative research methods to separate the specific components of open‐ended depressive and anxious thought content in 79 psychiatric outpatients. Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 36), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD; n = 10), and other psychiatric disorders (PC; n = 33) were instructed to (a) describe their most bothersome problem; (b) imagine the worst possible negative outcome followed by the best possible positive outcome; and (c) describe associated thoughts and emotions for each scenario. The content of patients' responses were coded to examine (a) the types and severity of problems; (b) the presence or absence of hopelessness, catastrophizing, hopefulness, and unrealistic positive expectations; and (c) the presence or absence of particular emotions associated with imagined worst and best outcomes. More GAD patients than MDD and PC patients indicated anticipated anxious emotions associated with imagined worst outcomes, and fewer MDD patients than GAD and PC patients indicated anticipated happiness associated with imagined best outcomes. No group differences emerged for the other variables considered. These findings suggest that depressed and anxious patients differ in their cognitive expectancies about future life events in terms of their own anticipated emotional reactions.     

Does culture shape face perception in autism? Cross‐cultural evidence of the own‐race advantage from the UK and Japan

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with face perception atypicalities, and atypical experience with faces has been proposed as an underlying explanation. Studying the own‐race advantage (ORA) for face recognition can reveal the effect of experience on face perception in ASD, although the small number of studies in the area present mixed findings. This study probed the ORA in ASD by comparing two cultural groups simultaneously for the first time. Children with ASD in the UK (N = 16) and Japan (N = 26) were compared with age‐ and ability‐matched typically developing (TD) children in the UK (N = 16) and Japan (N = 26). Participants completed a two‐alternative forced‐choice task, whereby they had to recognize a just seen face from a foil which was manipulated in one of four ways (IC: identity change; EE: easy eyes; HE: hard eyes; HM: hard mouth). Face stimuli were Asian and Caucasian, and thus the same stimuli were own and other race depending on the cultural group. The ASD groups in the UK and Japan did not show impaired face recognition abilities, or impairments with recognizing faces depending on manipulations to the eye region, and importantly they showed an ORA. There was considerable heterogeneity in the presence of the ORA in ASD and TD and also across cultures. Children in Japan had higher accuracy than children in the UK, and TD children in Japan did not show an ORA. This cross‐cultural study challenges the view that atypical experiences with faces lead to a reduced/absent ORA in ASD.     

Mustering motivation to enact decisions: how decision process characteristics influence goal realization

Decision scientists tend to focus mainly on decision antecedents, studying how people make decisions. Action psychologists, in contrast, study post‐decision issues, investigating how decisions, once formed, are maintained, protected, and enacted. Through the research presented here, we seek to bridge these two disciplines, proposing that the process by which decisions are reached motivates subsequent pursuit and benefits eventual realization. We identify three characteristics of the decision process (DP) as having motivation‐mustering potential: DP effort investment, DP importance, and DP confidence. Through two field studies tracking participants' decision processes, pursuit and realization, we find that after controlling for the influence of the motivational mechanisms of goal intention and implementation intention, the three decision process characteristics significantly influence the successful enactment of the chosen decision directly. The the oretical and practical implications of these findings are considered and future research opportunities are identified. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Common barriers to healthcare for transgender people in the U.S. Southeast

Abstract

Background: Transgender and non-binary people are more likely to face barriers to healthcare than their cisgender counterparts. The majority of work in this area centers on the experiences of transgender people in northern cities and urban enclaves, yet over 500,000 transgender people live in the U.S. Southeast.

Aims: The purpose of this study is to explore barriers to healthcare among transgender people in the U.S. Southeast.

Methods: The research team conducted four 120-minute focus groups (eligibility criteria: 18?years or older, self-identify as transgender, live in the U.S. Southeast). Participants completed a demographic questionnaire prior to the start of the focus group. Each focus group explored access to and experiences of receiving basic healthcare as a transgender person in the U.S. Southeast. Established qualitative methods were used to conduct the focus groups and data analysis.

Results: Participants (n?=?48) ranged in age from 19 to 65, with the majority identifying as trans women (43.8%) and non-binary (33.3%). The sample was racially diverse: White (50%), Black (37.5%), and Latinx or Multiracial (12.5%). Multiple barriers to care were identified: (1) fear and mistrust of providers; (2) inconsistency in access to healthcare; (3) disrespect from providers; and, (4) mistreatment due to intersecting experiences of gender, race, class, and location.

Discussion: Transgender Southerners face barriers to care at the structural, cultural, and interpersonal levels. The study results have implications for researchers, as well as providers, practices, and health care systems throughout the region.     

A Review of Spiritual and Religious Measures in Nursing Research Journals: 1995--1999

Background: A series of systematic reviews has revealed relatively high levels of interest in religion and spirituality in different nursing specialties, but not in general nursing research journals. Purpose: To identify the extent to which spirituality and religiousness were measured in all quantitative and qualitative research articles published in Research in Nursing and Health, Nursing Research, Advances in Nursing Science (ANS), and Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship from 1995 to 1999. Methods: A full-text search was conducted of ANS and Image using the Ovid search system. Nursing Research and Research in Nursing and Health were hand searched for spiritual/religious measures. Characteristics of selected studies, the measures taken, and their uses were coded for data analysis. Results: A total of 564 research studies were identified, of which 67 (11.9%) included at least one measure of spirituality or religiousness. A significant difference was found between the percentage of qualitative and quantitative studies that contained measures of these concepts. Of the 119 qualitative studies, 23 (19.3%) contained a measure of religion or spirituality, compared to 44 of the 445 (9.9%) quantitative studies. Nominal indicators of religious affiliation were the most commonly used measures in the quantitative studies and measures of religion and spirituality were rarely used in the analyses. Although only a few quantitative or qualitative studies intended to focus on religion or spirituality, these themes often emerged spontaneously in the qualitative research. Conclusions: Research in Nursing and Health, Advances in Nursing Science, Nursing Research, and Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship all published research measuring spirituality and religiousness during the time-period studied. The rate at which spirituality and religion appeared in these nursing research articles is substantially higher than that found in most fields outside of nursing. Even more frequent inclusion of spiritual and religious variables and richer measures of spirituality and religiousness would help to increase the available scientific information on the role of spirituality and religion in nursing care.     

THE ONEIRIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GEORGES PEREC

Georges Perec's book La Boutique Obscure (1973; translated into English in 2012) serves as the basis for this paper. The book is a collection of dreams that its author dreamed from May 1968 to August 1972. The present author treats these dreams as chapters in a bizarre autobiography, elaborating Perec's life through a discussion of those dreams and using them as a starting point with which to discuss his views of dream interpretation and the role of dreams in psychoanalysis.     

Testing the Situationism Scale in Europe: Scale validation,self‐regulation and regional differences

The term situationism refers to an individual's belief about the importance of a behaviour's context. This study tested whether the degree of situationism expressed by individuals in various regions of Europe was consistent with self‐regulation and cross‐cultural theories. The English version of a Situationism Scale (measuring beliefs about the relation between the environment and one's own behaviour) was translated into five additional languages: Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian and Slovenian. Young adults (N = 1106, M_Age = 22.9 years, 79% female) across Europe responded to one of the six language versions of the scale as part of a larger survey. Results indicated that: new language versions were psychometrically valid; there was a positive relation between situationism and the use of situation‐control strategies; and situationism was higher for individuals from regions that are Eastern European and relatively more interdependent, compared with individuals from regions that are Western European and relatively less interdependent. As the first evaluation of the Situationism Scale outside America, this study supports the Scale's validity and suggests not only may some effects of situationism be universal, but between‐ and within‐culture differences in situationism exist. Overall, when making judgments and decisions about the self, cultural background and individual differences in situationism may come into play.     

An investigation into the psychometric properties of the CORE‐OM in patients with eating disorders

Aim: The current study aimed to explore the psychometric properties of the CORE‐OM (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure) when used in an eating disorder sample. Method: The CORE‐OM was administered at assessment to 360 individuals referred to an eating disorders service. Principal component analysis was conducted to look at the psychometric structure of the CORE‐OM, and psychometric properties were investigated using analyses of reliability and validity. Results: Analyses of the psychometric structure suggested a three‐component solution reflecting negatively worded, positively worded and risk items. The CORE‐OM showed good acceptability, acceptable internal and test‐retest reliabilities, as well as good convergent and known groups validity. Conclusions: The results of the current study support the CORE‐OM as a reliable and valid measure for assessing psychological distress in eating disorders.     

Multi‐set factor analysis by means of Parafac2

We consider multi‐set data consisting of observations, k = 1,…, K (e.g., subject scores), on J variables in K different samples. We introduce a factor model for the J × J covariance matrices , k = 1,…, K, where the common part is modelled by Parafac2 and the unique variances , k = 1,…, K, are diagonal. The Parafac2 model implies a common loadings matrix that is rescaled for each k, and a common factor correlation matrix. We estimate the unique variances by minimum rank factor analysis on for each k. The factors can be chosen orthogonal or oblique. We present a novel algorithm to estimate the Parafac2 part and demonstrate its performance in a simulation study. Also, we fit our model to a data set in the literature. Our model is easy to estimate and interpret. The unique variances, the factor correlation matrix and the communalities are guaranteed to be proper, and a percentage of explained common variance can be computed for each k. Also, the Parafac2 part is rotationally unique under mild conditions.     

Productive and Re‐productive Thinking in Solving Insight Problems

Many innovations in organizations result when people discover insightful solutions to problems. Insightful problem‐solving was considered by Gestalt psychologists to be associated with productive, as opposed to re‐productive, thinking. Productive thinking is characterized by shifts in perspective which allow the problem solver to consider new, sometimes transformational, approaches. Re‐productive thinking, on the other hand, involves the application of familiar, routine, procedures. This article reports a study which investigated how self‐reported productive and re‐productive thinking are related to an individual's ability to solve insight problems. Our measures were tested against the Kirton Adaption‐Innovation Inventory (KAI), and a battery of spatial insight problems. The results indicated that productive and re‐productive thinking and the KAI were successful in predicting performance on spatial insight problems. Furthermore, the measures of productive and re‐productive thinking accounted for spatial insight performance independently of scores on the KAI. In addition, the results suggested that re‐productive thinking consists of two different components—one based on group conventions and the other on personal experience. Each contributed differently to solving insight problems.     

Emotion regulation and psychopathological symptoms of Chinese school‐age children: A person‐centred and multi‐informant approach

Emotion regulation (ER) is a critical component of children's development. Many previous studies have utilised a single‐assessment method to reflect child ER, which might result in losing important information regarding the unique contribution of each informant. With a person‐centred approach and multi‐informant reports (mother, teacher and child), the current study examined 196 children's (age M = 9.21, SD = 1.10, range = 7–11 years; 51% girls) ER patterns and their associations with psychopathological symptoms in a Chinese sample. A model‐based clustering procedure resulted in 3 ER groups: the poor family ER group (n = 36), poor school ER group (n = 120), and overall good ER group (n = 40). Significant differences were found among ER clusters on teacher‐reported child psychopathological symptoms compared on the levels of withdrawn depression, somatic complain, thought problems and attention problems. No significant differences were found on the mother‐reported psychopathological symptoms. Compared with children in the poor school or poor family ER clusters, children in the overall good ER group demonstrated fewer psychopathological symptoms at school. Our results confirmed the advantage of adopting multi‐informant assessments to fully capture children's emotional profiles and linked these profiles with children's emotional and behavioural functioning at school.     

Beyond Deep Incarnation: Rethinking Christology in Radical Lutheran Terms

This article takes the demise of Christendom and what Diana Butler Bass calls the end of religion as its point of departure for a “radical” rethinking of God in fully kenotic terms. It rejects any vestige of otherworldly transcendence as a temptation to escapism, inviting us instead to seek God's complete presence among us here in the world. Going beyond Niels Gregersen's understanding of the deep incarnation of the Logos and starting instead with a complete commitment to the infra‐Lutheranum, the author presents a radical Lutheran theology that embraces a total kenosis of God whose liberating and life‐giving reappearance we must find implicit among us in unexpected places, not least of which might include the embers of a dying church or the crumbling of our religious institutions.