Locating experience in time and place: a look at young adult fiction and spiritual intelligence

Spiritual intelligence describes self-awareness and intuition, with the development of creative thinking, compassion and connectedness with others. Many researchers point to an awakening and development of spiritual intelligence that is enhanced through exploration of existential questions within the genre of young adult fiction. Such literature absorbs the adolescent reader so that they become transported into the narrative, exploring a sense of self and of others This article discusses the ways in which young adult fiction, including comparison of a novel of older context (An Episode of Sparrows) with contemporary dystopian fiction (The Maze Runner), can foster young adults’ exploration of self-awareness and cultivate the continued development of notions of connectedness, justice and responsibility. It describes current research on the relationship between spiritual intelligence in young adults and the narrative transportation effect of young adult fiction.     

Speaking for the baby: A therapeutic intervention with adolescent mothers and their infants

Adolescent mothers frequently experience problems in mother-infant interaction. However, intervention can be very difficult, particularly when complicated by unresolved conflicts involving relationships in the young woman's past. This article describes a therapeutic intervention, based on the work of Fraiberg, which allows the young mother to learn to interpret her infant's cues while also encouraging her to express her own emotions in the context of the mother-infant relationship. Two case studies are discussed to illustrate the use of the technique as part of a program of mother-infant intervention.     

Developmental Play Therapy: A Treatment Approach for Child Victims of Sexual Molestation

The author describes the use of developmental play therapy as a treatment approach for young children who have been sexually molested.     

Conversations with young people in rural and remote places: transforming the emerging self (ANZAP 16th Annual Conference "Trauma and the Transformational Conversation")

This paper describes the laying of a foundation for transformation of the inner world and the emergence of "self" in young people using the Conversational Model. The author works with young people in a technical college in a remote part of Victoria Australia. Some of the clients have experienced extreme trauma as children and live in an ongoing state of traumatic stress. The young clients are deep thinkers and intelligent, yet trapped by dysfunctional family settings. Their situations are compounded by the remote and rural location of their community. The conversational process promotes the gradual transformation of their inner world and the emergence of a healthier "self."     

Teenage Childbearing,Reproductive Justice,and Infant Mental Health

Reproductive justice advocates emphasize the rights of women to choose to have children, to decide the conditions under which they give birth, and to parent their children with support, safety, and dignity. This article examines what a reproductive justice perspective contributes to infant mental health work with teenage mothers and their families. It explores the historical framing of teenage pregnancy in which young mothers are the cause of a variety of social problems and in which the primary policy and practice approach is pregnancy prevention. The article offers alternative framings of teenage childbearing, based on reproductive justice principles, which focus on social conditions surrounding teenage parenthood and the meaning of motherhood in the lives of young women. These alternative frames shift the practice agenda to eradicating unjust social conditions and providing supports for young women in their roles as parents. The article then describes ways in which two infant mental health programs have incorporated reproductive justice principles into their work with young families: Chicago's community doula model and Florida's Young Parents Project for court-involved teenage parents. Finally, the article extracts a set of principles deriving from a reproductive justice perspective that are relevant to infant mental health work with young families.     

Childhood and Offense-Related Trauma in Young People Imprisoned in England and Wales for Murder and Other Acts of Serious Violence: A Descriptive Study

This study describes the prevalence of traumatic childhood experiences and the extent of trauma-related symptomatology in a group of incarcerated young men within the Young People’s prison estate in England. Semistructured interviews using the Trauma History Interview, the Intrusions and Ruminations Interview, and the Impact of Events Scale–Revised were conducted with 34 young men aged 15 to 17 years who had either murdered or committed serious violence and were serving indeterminate or long-term sentences. Many of the young men had experienced high levels of childhood trauma, and some were still experiencing trauma related to the committal of their offenses approximately 18 months after their offenses had been committed. This is an important finding in relation to the prevalence of unrecognized and untreated traumatized young prisoners.     

The Influence of Early Life Course Religious Exposure on Young Adults' Dispositions Toward Childbearing

Previous research about religion and childbearing focuses on childbearing behavior, yet is motivated by the idea that behavioral outcomes result from the influence of religion on individuals' childbearing dispositions. This article describes how early life religious exposure may influence young adults' childbearing attitudes and preferences as they transition to adulthood. Analyses of intergenerational panel data suggest that, compared with others, young adults with Catholic mothers, or mothers who frequently attend religious services, are more likely to object to voluntary childlessness, to feel the average American family should have more children, and to desire many children for themselves. The effect of having a Catholic mother appears to operate through the mother's own dispositions and behaviors. The effect of their mothers' religious service attendance operates through the young adults' own religious participation and the importance they place on religion. The consistent effects of early life religious exposure on subsequent child-bearing dispositions outweigh the effects of socioeconomic factors and point to religion as an influential institution in the formation of child-bearing preferences.     

Infants and Young Children in Military Families: A Conceptual Model for Intervention

Infants and young children of parents in the military deserve special attention because the first years of life are pivotal in establishing trusting attachment relationships, which are based on the developmental expectation that parents will be reliably available and protective both physically and emotionally. For young children in military families, the stresses of extended absences of mothers and/or fathers as the result of deployment abroad, recurrent separations and reunions resulting from repeated deployments, or parents struggling with the emotional sequelae of their war experiences, and the traumatic impact of parental injury and death can strain and derail the normative expectation of parental availability and protectiveness. This article describes the key features of mental health in infancy and early childhood, the developmentally expectable early anxieties that all children experience in the first years of life across cultures and circumstances, and the ways in which these normative anxieties are exacerbated by the specific circumstances of military families. The article also describes interventions that may be helpful in supporting military families and their children with the specific challenges they face.     

A crisis mental health intervention service: an innovative model for working intensively with young people on the edge of care

This paper describes the setting up and the first year of running of an innovative outreach service for adolescents on the edge of care that aimed at redressing family breakdown and preventing placements in the care system. It was a collaborative endeavour between social services and a child and adolescent mental health provision to facilitate the engagement of hard to reach young people and families that often presented high levels of risk. This article describes a distinctive model of applied psychoanalytic work with individuals, families and the networks of practitioners and agencies around the case. It focuses on the integration of two perspectives: the individual and the family on the one hand and the organisation on the other. Case examples illustrate how our psychoanalytic and developmental framework illuminated our understanding of frequently extreme acting out behaviour and parental difficulties in terms of underlying intergenerational trauma, which was often re-enacted. This framework also helped in understanding the difficulties that practitioners experienced and how these related to individual and family dynamics. The article describes the significance of containment in the treatment of adolescents and families in crisis as well as in supporting the professional network.     

Expressions of Religiosity and Spirituality among Australian 14 Year Olds

This article describes and reports on part of a research project that was carried out by three researchers, among 248 Year 6 (11 years old) and 338 Year 9 (14 years old) students in the Catholic schools of Victoria, Australia. The research set out to discover information about religious affiliation and practice among the young people, the ways in which they typically expressed spirituality, and the extent to which religious affiliation and practice did or did not provide a framework for, and nurture, their spirituality. This paper reports on the findings of the research in relation to the Year 9 students, detailing characteristics of the spirituality of the young people and demonstrating that it cannot be assumed that Church affiliation and practice nurture young peoples' spirituality. The research was introductory and provocative in that it indicates some discrepancies with other research in one of its six areas, that of religious practice. While possible reasons for this discrepancy are given, it is hoped that the research described here will provoke further and more specific studies.     

Using Behavioral Parent Training to Treat Disruptive Behavior Disorders in Young Children: A How-to Approach Using Video Clips

This article describes the application of a behavioral parent training program, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), in the treatment of behavior disorders in young children. PCIT is unique in that it works with both the child and parent in treatment and it focuses on improving the parent-child relationship as a means to improving parent and child behaviors and interactions with each other. A case illustration is provided and video components are included to highlight the procedures and concepts used in PCIT.     

The effects of ageing and divided attention on the self-reference effect in emotional memory: Spontaneous or effortful mnemonic benefits?

The self-reference effect (SRE) is a powerful memory advantage associated with encoding in reference to the self (e.g., Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). To explore whether this mnemonic benefit occurs spontaneously, the current study assessed how ageing and divided attention affect the magnitude of the SRE in emotional memory (i.e., memory for emotional stimuli). The sample included a young Full Attention group (young-FA), a young Divided Attention group (young-DA), and an older adult group. The division of attention was manipulated at encoding where participants incidentally studied positive, negative, and neutral trait adjectives in either a self-reference (i.e., rating how well each word describes themselves) or an other-reference condition (i.e., rating how well each word describes another person). Memory for these words was assessed with both recall and recognition tasks. The results from both tasks demonstrated equivalent SRE for all three groups across emotional valence categories of stimuli, suggesting that the SRE is a spontaneous, effortless, and robust effect in memory.     

'Joined-up psychotherapy': the place of individual psychotherapy in residential therapeutic provision for children

This paper looks at the provision of individual psychotherapy within a residential setting for young children. It gives a brief historical context of the work of therapeutic communities, and describes one such community in detail. The paper emphasizes the need for psychotherapy to be fully 8 integrated into the overall treatment of severely damaged children, and seeks to raise questions about the need to modify ideas on confidentiality and boundaries in such a setting. Case material is presented to illustrate this.     

Personality characteristics of the crosscountry hitchhiker

This paper describes the first empirical analysis of the personalities of crosscountry hitchhikers. One hundred and four young adults were tested in 32 states using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as the measuring instrument. The results display the predominance of the intuitive and feeling functions among subjects, and also the utilization of the perceptual function in dealing with the environment. These findings suggest a personality which is impulsive and autonomous, having a high degree of tolerance for complexity and change, and strong interest in interpersonal relations. These young hitchhikers also differ on a number of personality dimensions from three comparison groups previously obtained by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, but are most similar to students in psychological and counseling training services. Implications of the results in explaining this "nomadic behavior" are discussed.     

L’Empan de lecture comme épreuve mesurant la capacité de mémoire de travail : normes basées sur une population francophone de 775 adultes jeunes et âgés

The present article describes the development, administration, scoring procedure and sampling of a Reading Span Task assessing the controlled attention component of working memory. This task was standardized on a French speaking population of 775 young and older adults. The task holds satisfactory reliability, validity and sensibility and thus appears to be a reliable tool to measure working memory capacity. The norms were established as a function of participants’ age, gender and socio-cultural level.     

Family Pathology and the Creation of Madness: A Case Study of Mind Control

This article describes the evolution of madness in a vulnerable young woman through the progressive manipulation of her religiosity and other beliefs. Evidence acquired during the forensic psychological investigation of a murder led to an ultimately finding of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. This case offers insight into the impact of two seriously impaired families systems as well as the profound pathology in a young man who unwittingly induced profound mental illness in his very vulnerable step-sister and the mother of his baby. Therapeutic Intervention over several years and then follow up over eight years showed no evidence of any ongoing or concurrent mental illness after her discharge from detention.     

A Descriptive Analysis of the Theory and Processes of an Innovative Day Program for Young Women with Trauma-Related Symptoms

This article describes the theoretical foundation and processes of a trauma treatment and skills training program for young adult women. The goal of the program is to decrease length of hospital stay and increase community stability. Experiences of trauma in childhood may lead to struggles in young adulthood. Hypervigilance, hyperarousal, and poor responses to sensory stimuli are often evident, as is self-injurious behavior and episodic behavioral dysregulation. Grace House is operationalized around three components implemented by occupational therapists and other professional staff: Attachment, self-regulation, and competency; sensory-based strategies, and a strength-based approach that builds upon internal and external resources.