From front line to home front: a study of secondary traumatization.

While the long-term effects of combat trauma on veterans have been studied extensively, its impact on veterans' wives has yet to be investigated. This study examined the implications of combat-induced psychopathology--wartime combat stress reaction (CSR) and current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)--in a sample of 205 wives of Israeli combat veterans of the 1982 Lebanon war. Results show that both CSR and PTSD were associated with increased psychiatric symptoms in the wives. In addition, current PTSD was particularly found to contribute to impaired social relations among veterans' wives in a broad range of contexts, from inner feelings of loneliness, through impaired marital and family relations, and extending to the wider social network. Implications of these findings for treatment and further research are discussed.     

Emotions and emotional communication in infants

Important advances have recently been made in studying emotions in infants and the nature of emotional communication between infants and adults. Infant emotions and emotional communications are far more organized than previously thought. Infants display a variety of discrete affective expressions that are appropriate to the nature of events and their context. They also appreciate the emotional meaning of the affective displays of caretakers. The emotional expressions of the infant and the caretaker function to allow them to mutually regulate their interactions. Indeed, it appears that a major determinant of children's development is related to the operation of this communication system. Positive development may be associated with the experience of coordinated interactions characterized by frequent reparations of interactive errors and the transformation of negative affect into positive affect, whereas negative development appears to be associated with sustained periods of interactive failure and negative affect.     

Hypothesizing and evidence-gathering: the nexus of understanding

Prior discussion of hypothesizing as a session "guideline" has not fully clarified the derivation of hypotheses. Reviewing relevant philosophy of science literature, the authors develop the notions of evidence and evidence-gathering in systemic family therapy. The authors claim evidence-gathering and hypothesizing are interdependent, reciprocal elements of scientific understanding. The structure of evidence is described along with practical and qualitative rules for collecting and using evidence. This model is applied to a case example illustrating the logic of clinical process. Implications are discussed for family therapy training and supervision.     

Acupuncture and emotion: the influence of acupuncture anesthesia on the sensory and emotional components of pain

Objective indices (heart rate, perspiration quantity, finger plethysmograph curves, and facial expression) and subjective indices (sensory and emotional subject reports) were recorded for 25 young Chinese adults (16 men, 9 women) during and after the simultaneous application of a strong pain stimulus and either foot classical (alloneural points Tsusanli and Yanglingchuan) or hand classical (alloneural points Hegu and Neiguan) acupuncture. Both forms of acupuncture were equally effective, showing that stimulation of the same nerve is not essential for pain relief. Acupuncture assuaged the emotional, but not the sensory, response to the painful stimulation.     

Perception of social distributions

Accurate representation of the distribution of social attitudes and behaviors can guide effective social behavior and is often essential for correct inferences. We examined the accuracy of people's beliefs about the distributions of a large number of attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In two studies we measured actual attitudes and behaviors in a student population, and we assessed beliefs by asking subjects to estimate the distribution of 100 students on these dimensions. We examined the accuracy of subjects' perceptions of the means, standard deviations, and distribution shapes. Subjects showed a number of systematic biases, including overestimation of dispersion and overestimation of the means of behavioral distributions and a false consensus bias, but their overall accuracy was impressive.