Addressing Challenges in Individual Psychotherapy with Delusional Patients: A Case Study

Although cognitive-behavioral treatments for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders demonstrate strong results in clinical trials, not all patients respond to these treatments. Common challenges in psychotherapy with delusional patients include a mismatch between the therapist’s and the patient’s expectations about the purpose of therapy, the patient’s lack of motivation to reduce delusional beliefs in service of other goals, and the patient’s dependence on the delusions in order to preserve an intact sense of self. This case highlights the value of integrating a psychodynamic perspective with cognitive-behavioral interventions to address challenges in psychotherapy with chronically delusional patients.     

Working Memory Effects of Gap-Predictions in Normal Adults: An Event-Related Potentials Study

The current study examined the relationship between verbal memory span and the latency with which a filler-gap dependency is constructed. A previous behavioral study found that low span listeners did not exhibit antecedent reactivation at gap sites in relative clauses, in comparison to high verbal memory span subjects (Roberts et?al. in J Psycholinguist Res 36(2):175-188, 2007), which suggests that low span subjects are delayed at gap filling. This possibility was examined in the current study. Using an event-related potentials paradigm, it was found that low span subjects have an onset latency delay of about 200?ms in brain responses to violations of syntactic expectancies after the gap site, thus providing a time course measure of the delay hypothesized by previous literature.     

Global and local pitch perception in children with developmental dyslexia

This study investigated global versus local pitch pattern perception in children with dyslexia aged between 8 and 11 years. Children listened to two consecutive 4-tone pitch sequences while performing a same/different task. On the different trials, sequences either preserved the contour (local condition) or they violated the contour (global condition). Compared to normally developing children, dyslexics showed robust pitch perception deficits in the local but not the global condition. This finding was replicated in a simple pitch direction task, which minimizes sequencing and short term memory. Results are consistent with a left-hemisphere deficit in dyslexia because local pitch changes are supposedly processed by the left hemisphere, whereas global pitch changes are processed by the right hemisphere. The present data suggest a link between impaired pitch processing and abnormal phonological development in children with dyslexia, which makes pitch pattern processing a potent tool for early diagnosis and remediation of dyslexia.     

Birth order, sex of child, and perceptions of parental favoritism

Many studies have examined factors that influence discriminative parental solicitude. Sex, birth order, and age of the mother are a few factors demonstrated to influence levels of parental investment (especially as measured by offspring self-report). One indicator of a high level of parental investment is being a parental favorite. Using self-reports from a sample of several hundred young adults, we secured support for two hypotheses related to the influence of birth order and sex on parental favoritism. Fathers are not perceived as having a favorite child more often than are mothers, but are more likely to favor female children than are mothers. Mothers are perceived to be more likely to favor female children in blended sibships. Both mothers and fathers are perceived as favoring genetically-related children. The results also suggest that the birth order of the parental favorite varies with the birth order of the participant. Firstborns and lastborns report a pattern of favoritism that suggests parents favor firstborn and lastborn children. The discussion addresses limitations of the methodology and presents directions for future research.     

Carry on: spontaneous object carrying in 13-month-old crawling and walking infants

Carrying objects requires coordination of manual action and locomotion. This study investigated spontaneous carrying in 24 walkers who were 13 months old and 26 crawlers who were 13 months old during 1-hr, naturalistic observations in the infants' homes. Carrying was more common in walkers, but crawlers also carried objects. Typically, walkers carried objects in their hands, whereas crawlers multitasked by using their hands simultaneously for holding objects and supporting their bodies. Locomotor experience predicted frequency of carrying in both groups, suggesting that experienced crawlers and walkers perceive their increased abilities to handle objects while in motion. Despite additional biomechanical constraints imposed by holding an object, carrying may actually improve upright balance: Crawlers rarely fell while carrying an object, and walkers were more likely to fall without an object in hand than while carrying. Thus, without incurring an additional risk of falling, spontaneous carrying may provide infants with new avenues for combining locomotor and manual skills and for interacting with their environments.     

Can survival processing enhance story memory? Testing the generalizability of the adaptive memory framework

Research from the adaptive memory framework shows that thinking about words in terms of their survival value in an incidental learning task enhances their free recall relative to other semantic encoding strategies and intentional learning (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008). We found similar results. When participants used incidental survival encoding for a list of words (e.g., "Will this object enhance my survival if I were stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land?"), they produced better free recall on a surprise test than did participants who intentionally tried to remember those words (Experiment 1). We also found this survival processing advantage when the words were presented within the context of a survival or neutral story (Experiment 2). However, this advantage did not extent to memory for a story's factual content, regardless of whether the participants were tested by cued recall (Experiment 3) or free recall (Experiments 4-5). Listening to a story for understanding under intentional or incidental learning conditions was just as good as survival processing for remembering story content. The functionalist approach to thinking about memory as an evolutionary adaptation designed to solve reproductive fitness problems provides a different theoretical framework for research, but it is not yet clear if survival processing has general applicability or is effective only for processing discrete stimuli in terms of fitness-relevant scenarios from our past.