Child,mother, and father evaluations of depression in psychiatric inpatient children

The agreement among children and their parents in evaluating the children's depression was examined in 48 families. Newly admitted inpatient children (ages 6–13) and their mothers and fathers independently completed selfreport and interview measures to assess severity and duration of the children's depression. The results indicated that different measures of depression completed by the same rater (child, mother, or father) were highly intercorrelated. Yet there was little or no relationship between childmother and child-father ratings of the children's depression for the same or related measures of depression. Children independently diagnosed (DSM III) as depressed rated themselves and were rated by their parents as more depressed than nondepressed children. Even so, children consistently rated themselves as less depressed across the measures than did their parents. Parent ratings of the children's depression and the correspondence of child-parent ratings varied as a function of several child and family variables, including child IQ, gender, race, and family welfare status.This investigation was supported in part by a Research Scientist Development Award (1 K02 MH00353) to the first author from the National Institute of Mental Health and by a Clinical Research Center Grant for the Study of Affective Disorders (5 P50 MH30915-05) from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors are grateful to the clinical research team of the Child Psychiatric Treatment Service.     

Infant–mother and infant–father synchrony: The coregulation of positive arousal

To examine the coregulation of positive affect during mother–infant and father–infant interactions, 100 couples and their first‐born child were videotaped in face‐to‐face interactions. Parents' and infant's affective states were coded in one‐second frames, and synchrony was measured with time‐series analysis. The orientation, intensity, and temporal pattern of infant positive arousal were assessed. Synchrony between same‐gender parent–infant dyads was more optimal in terms of stronger lagged associations between parent and infant affect, more frequent mutual synchrony, and shorter lags to responsiveness. Infants' arousal during mother–infant interaction cycled between medium and low levels, and high positive affect appeared gradually and was embedded within a social episode. During father–child play, positive arousal was high, sudden, and organized in multiple peaks that appeared more frequently as play progressed. Mother–infant synchrony was linked to the partners' social orientation and was inversely related to maternal depression and infant negative emotionality. Father–child synchrony was related to the intensity of positive arousal and to father attachment security. Results contribute to research on the regulation of positive emotions and describe the unique modes of affective sharing that infants coconstruct with mother and father. ©2003 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

The search for the mother: narcissistic regression as a pathway of mourning in childhood.

Previous observers, following Freud's formulations in Mourning and Melancholia, have disagreed over the question of whether the child can mourn. To support the thesis that the child does mourn but in a different way from the adult, the author focuses on the importance of the child's identification with the lost love object, the narcissistic regression, and the associated autoerotic activities. Clinical material is presented from the analysis of a latency child and of an adult, both of whom lost their mothers during childhood.     

Skewed autonomy-relatedness in preadolescents' conceptions of their relationships with mother, father, and best friend.

Healthy adaptation within all close relationships--whether with parents, friends, or romantic partners--involves striking a balance between connectedness to and independence from the relationship partner. For some individuals, adaptation within one or more relationships is skewed, or characterized by either an excessive concern for closeness that impedes autonomy (preoccupied stance) or an excessive concern for autonomy that inhibits closeness (avoidant stance). In this study with boys and girls aged 9-14 years, children who reported a preoccupied or avoidant stance toward their mother displayed increased social impairment in the peer group over time. There were predictable associations among children's stances toward mother, father, and best friend. Children resembled their best friend in relationship stance. The study illustrates the advantages of applying common relationship constructs (e.g., autonomy-relatedness) to the study of diverse close relationships.     

The central executive as a search process: priming exploration and exploitation across domains

The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is common to a wide variety of problems involving search in space and mind. The prevalence of this trade-off and its neurological underpinnings led us to propose domain-general cognitive search processes (Hills, Todd, & Goldstone, 2008). We propose further that these are consistent with the idea of a central executive search process that combines goal-handling across subgoal hierarchies. In the present study, we investigate 3 aspects of this proposal. First, the existence of a unitary central executive search process should allow priming from 1 search task to another and at multiple hierarchical levels. We confirm this by showing cross-domain priming from a spatial search task to 2 different cognitive levels within a lexical search task. Second, given the neural basis of the proposed generalized cognitive search process and the evidence that the central executive is primarily engaged during complex tasks, we hypothesize that priming should require search in the sense of a self-regulated making and testing of sequential predictions about the world. This was confirmed by showing that when participants were allowed to collect spatial resources without searching for them, no priming occurred. Finally, we provide a mechanism for the underlying search process and investigate 3 alternative hypotheses for subgoal hierarchies using the central executive as a search process model (CESP). CESP envisions the central executive as having both emergent and unitary processes, with one of its roles being a generalized cognitive search process that navigates goal hierarchies by mediating persistence on and switching between subgoals.     

Like father,like son: Toward a developmental model for the transmission of male deviance across generations

This study examined two competing developmental models for social mechanisms linking father?–?son deviance in two-parent families. Assessment of family management, father antisocial behaviour, and sons' antisocial behaviour at age nine used multiple measurement methods. At age 13?–?14, boys were observed interacting with friends on videotape; at age 23?–?24, they were followed and assessed, looking at arrest records, self-reported delinquency, and substance use. SEM was used to test competing models of the influence of fathers on sons' antisocial behaviour in young adulthood. Analyses supported a model linking fathers' childhood antisocial behaviour directly to sons' observed early adolescent deviant friendship interactions, and indirectly to young-adult problem behaviour. Although early parenting practices correlated with fathers' antisocial behaviour and boys' antisocial behaviour in childhood, they were not predictive of late association with deviant peers, once controlling for fathers' antisocial behaviour. Findings are discussed relative to possible biological and social mechanisms of cross-generation transmission of antisocial behaviour, as well as to prevention theory.     

Woman's social status as a reflection of the internal relationship to mother and father in both sexes1

Abstract

Starting with three examples showing different kinds of external barriers which meet a woman in her professional life, the author examines how they are related to internal elements. She points out power as a common factor, and proposes that Freud, as well as many succeeding male and female psychoanalysts, wishfully described women as suffering from deficiencies, while the unconscious image of Mother in children and adults of both sexes is the very opposite of this: a potentially dangerous or ideally good, powerful creature. She argues that both men and women out of fear for this power try to restrict and belittle the capabilities of women. This thesis is further delineated by references to Greek mythology and clinical examples.     

The shaping of personality: genes, environments, and chance encounters

I started my career as a clinical psychologist with an interest in personality assessment. But a loss of faith in psychoanalytic theory, projective tests, and clinical case studies in general led to a shift in my interests to personality research. Subsequent jobs at research institutes and universities allowed me to indulge in science. I developed the trait-state concept and its application in tests for affect measurement. For 10 years I did experimental research in the field of sensory deprivation. The sensation seeking idea and tests evolved from this work but soon expanded to many other areas. Research in the biological basis of sensation seeking started with genetic and psychophysiological research, but research conducted in other laboratories also pointed to a psychopharmacological basis for the trait. Over the last several decades, I have formulated a psychobiological model for personality. I have used factor analysis and the biosocial model to develop an "alternative-five" factorial trait structure for personality.     

The dynamics of search,impasse, and representational change provide a coherent explanation of difficulty in the nine-dot problem

The nine-dot problem is often used to demonstrate and explain mental impasse, creativity, and out of the box thinking. The present study investigated the interplay of a restricted initial search space, the likelihood of invoking a representational change, and the subsequent constraining of an unrestricted search space. In three experimental conditions, participants worked on different versions of the nine-dot problem that hinted at removing particular sources of difficulty from the standard problem. The hints were incremental such that the first suggested a possible route for a solution attempt; the second additionally indicated the dot at which lines meet on the solution path; and the final condition also provided non-dot locations that appear in the solution path. The results showed that in the experimental conditions, representational change is encountered more quickly and problems are solved more often than for the control group. We propose a cognitive model that focuses on general problem-solving heuristics and representational change to explain problem difficulty.     

Character: a concept in search of an identity

I have attempted to clarify the clinical usage of the concept of character. I have examined such terms as character trait, character, and character disorder. I have described various schemes of classification, and have proposed key definitions for the above terms. I have described the unique aspect of character, that is, its capacity to establish a relation between a superficial attribute and a deep structure. Finally, I have suggested that character represents the core of the individual from a particular point of view--a precipitate of a person's relations to the outside world.     

Six authors in search of a character: A play about intelligence tests in the year 2000

Six points of view regarding the future of intelligence testing are considered, and a combined, “prototypical” point of view is synthesized that seems to represent a consensus of authors regarding the directions in which intelligence testing and research on intelligence are going. The past history and present status of intelligence testing and research are briefly considered, and then their future is discussed. The future seems to include assessment of various kinds of components of intelligence—performance components, acquisition components, transfer components, and metacomponents. The distinction between academic and everyday intelligence is discussed, as are the cultural and temporal limits of any one notion of intelligence. Finally, the usefulness of the notion of intelligence as a prototype of people's beliefs is considered.     

In search of the Seven Dwarves: issues of measurement and meaning in alcohol expectancy research

Discusses substantive issues in predicting drinking patterns from expectancies, as well as issues of content and measurement of the scales developed to measure these expectancies. In recent years, much research has suggested that alcohol expectancies--or the beliefs that individuals hold about the effects of alcohol on their behavior, moods, and emotions--are an important factor in motivating drinking behavior. Although measures of these expectancies have consistently been shown to be correlated with measures of alcohol use, conceptual and methodological problems remain to be addressed. In order to progress in understanding this potentially important psychosocial factor in abusive and nonabusive drinking, alcohol expectancy research, which has been atheoretical in nature, should attend to potential contributions from other areas of research in psychology.     

Priming and binding in and across perception and action: a correlational analysis of the internal structure of event files

Individual performance was compared across three different tasks that tap into the binding of stimulus features in perception, the binding of action features in action planning, and the emergence of stimulus-response bindings (“event files”). Within a task correlations between the size of binding effects were found within visual perception (e.g., the strength of shape-location binding correlated positively with the strength of shape-colour binding) but not between perception and action planning, suggesting different, domain-specific binding mechanisms. To some degree, binding strength was predicted by priming effects of the respective features, especially if these features varied on a dimension that matched the current attentional set.     

The dynamics of daily events and well-being across cultures: when less is more

The authors examined cultural and individual differences in the relation between daily events and daily satisfaction. In a preliminary study, they established cross-cultural equivalence of 50 daily events. In the main study, participants in the United States, Korea, and Japan completed daily surveys on the 50 events and daily satisfaction for 21 days. The multilevel random coefficient model analyses showed that (a) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly stronger among Asian American, Korean, and Japanese participants than among European American participants and (b) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly weaker among individuals high in global life satisfaction than among those low in global life satisfaction. The findings demonstrate a weaker effect of positive events on daily well-being among individuals and cultures high in global well-being.     

The temporal dynamics of visual search: evidence for parallel processing in feature and conjunction searches

Feature and conjunction searches have been argued to delineate parallel and serial operations in visual processing. The authors evaluated this claim by examining the temporal dynamics of the detection of features and conjunctions. The 1st experiment used a reaction time (RT) task to replicate standard mean RT patterns and to examine the shapes of the RT distributions. The 2nd experiment used the response-signal speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure to measure discrimination (asymptotic detection accuracy) and detection speed (processing dynamics). Set size affected discrimination in both feature and conjunction searches but affected detection speed only in the latter. Fits of models to the SAT data that included a serial component overpredicted the magnitude of the observed dynamics differences. The authors concluded that both features and conjunctions are detected in parallel. Implications for the role of attention in visual processing are discussed.     

Six characters in search of an author: a constructivist view

The investigation of imaginative literature has been one of psychotherapy's most useful tools for the explication of its theories and the general dissemination of psychotherapeutic concepts. Using this idea, I examine Luigi Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author from a constructivist, family therapy, point of view.     

Substantive and operational issues of response bias across levels of analysis: an example of climate-satisfaction relationships

Two studies tested whether method variance is present at multiple levels of analysis and whether methodological procedures can minimize its impact. In Study 1, 8,052 employees from 71 hotels completed measures of climate, work environment characteristics, and satisfaction. A comparison of correlations at the individual level, cross-level, cross-level split, aggregate level, and aggregate-split level of analysis revealed that response bias was present across multiple levels. Results suggest that samples should be split in half when cross-level and aggregate correlations are computed to ameliorate response bias problems that arise from individual-level method variance. In Study 2, results indicated that the temporal spacing of measures of climate and satisfaction influenced response bias. Implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.