Life Satisfaction and Confidence in National Institutions: Evidence from South America

Applied Research in Quality of Life - A number of South American countries experienced turbulent democratic, political and economic upheaval over the last 40 years in the form of coup...     

The Importance of PRI Therapy for the Pastoral Counsellor

It is not always easy for pastoral counsellors to help people change. Often people have become stuck in their ways. Recent developments in the field of brain research help explain why change is difficult. This article discusses Past Reality Integration Therapy (PRI), a psychotherapeutic method that integrates recent findings of brain research and offers an important addition to the work of (pastoral) counsellors and psychotherapists. The use of this approach with Dutch students in their pastoral training is presented. Furthermore the importance of this new method for counsellors themselves, their clients and their work is discussed and some overall conclusions about the method and its practical application are presented.     

Prospective associations between social status and social anxiety in early adolescence

This study examined the transactional longitudinal association between social status (likeability and popularity) and social anxiety symptoms (fear of negative evaluation and social avoidance and distress), and explored gender differences in this association. Participants included 274 adolescents (136 boys, M_age = 12.55). Data were collected at two waves with a 6-month interval. Likeability and popularity were measured with peer nominations and social anxiety symptoms with self-reports. Autoregressive cross-lagged path models showed relative stability of social status and social anxiety. Girls who were seen as less popular by their classmates avoided social situations more frequently and experienced more distress during such situations over time. These results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different social status components and social anxiety symptoms and to take gender into account. Early support for less popular girls seems important to prevent more severe consequences of avoidance and distress, such as social exclusion and victimization.     

Prenatal sex hormones and human aggression: A review,and new data on progestogen effects

We review data on aggression from psychological studies of offspring from two categories of abnormal prenatal sex hormone conditions: 1) endocrine disorders, and 2) hormone treatment during pregnancy. Both sources yield trends and some significant findings that are in line with the animal research based expectations of a positive androgen effect on the development of aggressive behavior. However, the available studies have many methodological weaknesses, and the results are not strong and open to interpretations by factors other than prenatal hormones. Potential modes of prenatal sex hormone effects are also discussed. In the second part, we present data on 13 boys and 15 girls who had been exposed to medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) in utero and on 28 closely pair-matched controls. The double-blind follow-up examination at age 9 to 14 years included questionnaires, half-structured interviews with mother and child separately, and a battery of psychological tests. Interviews were tape-recorded and rated by two independent raters. The results show weak but consistent differences, with the MPA-exposed subjects being lower in self- or mother-reported aggression than the controls. The results cannot be accounted for by differences in aggression-related rearing styles. However, the influence of pregnancy pathology cannot be totally excluded. We conclude that the available data are compatible with the hypothesis that prenatal sex hormones influence the development of human aggressive behavior. More sophisticated research studies are needed, however, to demonstrate hormonal effects and their mechanism of action in a reliable and valid fashion.     

Social anxiety and perceptions of likeability by peers in children

The current study aimed to investigate the discrepancy between self-reported and peer-reported likeability among children, and the relation with social anxiety, depression, and social support. In total, 532 children between 7 and 12 years completed questionnaires about social anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and social support, estimated their own likeability, and indicated how much they liked their classmates. Children with higher levels of social anxiety or depression overestimated their likeability less or even underestimated their likeability. Social anxiety symptoms, but not depressive symptoms, were significant predictors of the discrepancy. Social support was positively related to likeability and negatively related to social anxiety, but did not moderate the association between social anxiety symptoms and perception accuracy of likeability. These results are in line with cognitive theories of childhood social anxiety, and they stress the importance of using multi-informant measures when studying the relation between social anxiety and social functioning in children.     

Dichotic listening following idiopathic precocious puberty: Speech processing capacity and temporal efficiency

Eleven right-handed adolescent females with a history of idiopathic precocious puberty (IPP) were compared to 11 pair-matched normal controls of similar maturational status. They were tested on a dichotic consonant-vowel (CV) discrimination task in which syllables were presented simultaneously to the two ears or with an interaural delay of 30 or 60 msec. The IPP and control groups did not differ: (1) in right-ear advantages; (2) in double-correct or total correct measures of accuracy; or (3) in "lag effects." The findings provide further evidence that timing of puberty--maturation rate--is not related to verbal ability or lateralization in adolescent females.     

Die Praxis der Konzentrativen Bewegungstherapie (KBT)

In a survey the 458 members of the German Association for Concentrative Movement Therapy (DAKBT) were asked in a questionnaire, to answer the question how the actual therapeutic practice of Concentrative Movement Therapy (KBT) in Germany looks like. They were asked about their therapeutic setting, the patients diagnoses and the duration of treatment. 67.5% of the questionnaires were sent back. 191 of those who answered, are working as professional psychotherapists, 62.8% of them with out-patients, 51.3% in hospitals, 17.8% in both therapeutic fields. Besides group psychotherapy most of them offer individual therapy, especially with out-patients. It is shown, that besides psychosomatic disorders (being a wellknown indication) KBT is also applied in a broad variety of other psychic disorders. Half of the outpatient treatments is finished within 50 meetings. Female patients and patients with personality or eating disorders show up a greater number of contacts in out-patient individual treatment. The results verify that in practice KBT is no longer confined to a supplementary group therapy.     

Category and perceptual interference in second-language phoneme learning: an examination of English /w/-/v/ learning by Sinhala, German, and Dutch speakers

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural recordings, their degree of spoken accent, their relative use of place and manner cues, the assimilation of these phonemes into native-language categories, and their perceptual maps (i.e., multidimensional scaling solutions) for these phonemes. Most Sinhala speakers had near-chance identification accuracy, Germans ranged from chance to 100% correct, and Dutch speakers had uniformly high accuracy. The results suggest that these learning differences were caused more by perceptual interference than by category assimilation; Sinhala and German speakers both have a single native-language phoneme that is similar to English /w/ and /v/, but the auditory sensitivities of Sinhala speakers make it harder for them to discern the acoustic cues that are critical to /w/-/v/ categorization.