Information processing in patients with first episode major depression

Hammar, Å., Kildal, A. B. & Schmid, M. (2012). Information processing in patients with first episode major depression. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 445–449. Few studies have investigated cognitive functioning in a group of patients experiencing a first episode of depression. The aim of this study was to investigate how patients diagnosed with a first episode of depression perform in effortful and non‐effortful information processing compared to healthy controls. An experimental paradigm based on a visual search test was applied. Thirty‐one patients and thirty‐one healthy controls were included in the study. All patients experienced a severe level of symptom load at the time of testing. Results showed no significant differences between groups under any of the conditions. Findings in the present study indicate that patients with a first episode of depression perform equally to healthy controls in tasks requiring visual attention in both effortful and non‐effortful information processing.     

Group Facilitator Supervision Through a One-Way Mirror

A model for group facilitator supervision using a one-way mirror for unobtrusive observations and interventions is presented. Methodology adapted from selected family therapies was applied in a group counseling class in order to achieve live supervision.     

Time perception: Effects of sex and sound intensity on scales of subjective duration

Six women and six men reproduced ten time intervals varying in logarithmic steps between 1.3 and 20 s. The durations were indicated by white noise of 10, 25, 40 and 55 dB SL, different sound intensities in different sessions. It was found that (i) greater sound intensity entails shorter reproductions, and (ii) reproductions by male observers are shorter than those by female, although for both (i) and (ii) there is an interaction with the standard durations. The data were treated in accordance with the "parallel-clock model" (Eisler, 1975), whereby the parameters of the psychophysical power function are determined from duration reproduction data. As in previous experiments (Eisler, 1975), the data showed a break in the function entailing two segments. The effect of sound intensity could be attributed to the exponent, which was lower for stronger noise, and the effect of sex to the weight coefficient of the upper relative to the lower segment of the psychophysical function, the coefficient being lower for men.     

Career Counseling and Counselor Training in Finland

This article gives an overview of career counseling and counselor training in Finland. Changes with respect to theory and practice are also discussed.     

Value Patterns and Content among Families of Soviet Immigrants: SYMLOG Analysis

The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand and compare two immigrant families whose children perceived their families to be well-functioning, and two families whose children perceived them to be poor-functioning. The method of analysis used for studying the values of the families is based on SYMLOG. Four families, who immigrated to Israel during the early seventies from the former USSR, and whose adolescents were born in Israel, were interviewed. The results show that in the two “well-functioning” families, there is a high degree of consensus on their values — those that they accept, as well as, those that they reject. The two “poor-functioning” families did not exhibit identical value patterns — neither in the values that they favor, nor in those that they reject. In terms of content, in the well-functioning families, there was a strong expression of two values: friendliness and the desirability of self-sacrifice in order to reach family goals. In contrast, in the poor-functioning families, the value of conservatism was salient. Finally, all four families expressed strong opposition to the values of strong individualism and nonconformity. Suggestions for family intervention are offered.     

Educator Perspectives on Creativity: An English Study

This article describes a project undertaken with eighteen educators from diverse backgrounds. They were all students on an Open University accredited postgraduate course devised to support their capability in fostering learner creativity across the curriculum. An ethnomethodological approach was used to track the experiences and perceptions of the educators and to ground these in personal biography. The article reports themes arising from the data which throw light on educator perceptions of fostering creativity in learners. Finally the article suggests a number of elements highlighted by the project as potentially core to fostering educators' self-perception of their ability to foster learner creativity across the curriculum.     

Early trauma and narcissism—autism bipolarity1

The analyst makes a series of considerations taken a posteriori from the analysis of a small number of patients. These patients have saved themselves from an early narcissistic catastrophe by developing precocious mental processes, while affective relationships rudimentarily repeat the impact with the original trauma. Primitive defences, essentially denial and vertical splitting, dissociate the tear in the psyche and structure a narcissism–autism bipolarity, revealed in aspects of the character which oblige the patient to automatically repeat a single matrix of experience. In therapy, it is necessary to construct a rst time of the trauma, by pending and linking threads of the primary relationship and strengthening them in the analytic relationship. This reconstruction of the background, a screen to project what had originally been rejected, is the prerequisite for coming out, in deferred action, from the hold of the pathological identifications. The author dedicates particular attention to the undifferentiated background, the nature‐environment torn by the trauma, and to the need to reconstruct this fabric of experience in the analytical relationship, as a fundamental element to the recomposition of the dissociated nuclei. In the clinical case, the analyst describes in particular how the analyst's words encounter an unbridgeable gap, a failure in the capacity for representation when opening the autistic nucleus. Through a regression lasting for about a year, a patient was able to live the experience of primitive agonies and that of an unbearable helplessness and, at the same time, was able to feel how the analyst supported her sense of existence. Subsequently, the patient was able to give shape, through visual images, to deep states of being and start the process of metabolising and symbolising the trauma.     

Assessing cognitive impairment in Indigenous Australians: Re‐evaluation of the Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment in Western Australia and the Northern Territory

The Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment (KICA) was initially developed and validated as a culturally appropriate dementia screening tool for older Indigenous people living in the Kimberley. This paper describes the re‐evaluation of the psychometric properties of the cognitive section (KICA‐Cog) of this tool in two different populations, including a Northern Territory sample, and a larger population‐based cohort from the Kimberley. In both populations, participants were evaluated on the KICA‐Cog tool, and independently assessed by expert clinical raters blinded to the KICA scores, to determine validity and reliability of dementia diagnosis for both groups. Community consultation, feedback and education were integral parts of the research. for the Northern Territory sample, 52 participants were selected primarily through health services. Sensitivity was 82.4% and specificity was 87.5% for diagnosis of dementia, with area under the curve (AUC) of .95, based on a cut‐off score of 31/32 of a possible 39. for the Kimberley sample, 363 participants from multiple communities formed part of a prevalence study of dementia. Sensitivity was 93.3% and specificity was 98.4% for a cut‐off score of 33/34, with AUC = .98 (95% confidence interval: 0.97–0.99). There was no education bias found. The KICA‐Cog appears to be most reliable at a cut‐off of 33/39.