A Study of Pastoral Care,Referral, and Consultation Practices Among Clergy in Four Settings in the New York City Area

Clergy (N = 179) in the catchment areas of four hospitals in New York and Connecticut were surveyed about their pastoral care activities. Factor analysis revealed two separate sets of problems presented in pastoral counseling, with respect to clergys ratings of their competence to address them. The first factor included grief, death and dying, anxiety, and marital problems, in descending order of frequency. The second factor consisted of depression, alcohol/drugs, domestic violence, severe mental illness, HIV/AIDS, and suicide. Clergy were significantly less confident of their ability to deal with Factor 2 problems, yet clergy rarely consulted with mental-health professionals about either type of problem. Less than half of the clergy had training in Clinical Pastoral Education, but those who did tended to feel they were more competent to deal with both types of problems. On average, clergy devoted 3.7 hours per week to visiting patients and nearly 55% said they were definitely more likely to refer a patient to a hospital with a pastoral care department.     

Changing the tune: the structure of the input affects infants' use of absolute and relative pitch

Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other types of input elicit relative pitch use by infants. In order to ask whether the structure of the input influences infants’ choice of pitch cues, we presented learners with continuous tone streams in which absolute pitch cues were rendered uninformative by transposing the tone sequences. Under these circumstances, both infants and adults successfully tracked relative pitches in a statistical learning task. Implications for the role played by the structure of the input in the learning process are considered.     

The Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory: is it valid and reliable for Mexican American youth?

In this study, we examined the internal consistency reliability, construct-related validity, and mean base rate scores of the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (MACI; Millon, Millon, & Davis, 1993) Personality and Clinical scales in a sample (N = 131) of juvenile offending, educationally at-risk, and substance-dependent Mexican American youth. Overall, the MACI scales demonstrated good reliability estimates. Using methods derived from contrast analysis (Westen & Rosenthal, 2003), the scales performed as would be expected based on predictions derived from Millon's (1969, 1981) theory. In addition, the scales differentiated in an expected fashion among the 3 groups. The results of this study provide preliminary support for the use of the MACI among Mexican Americans.     

Early Language Impairment and Young Adult Delinquent and Aggressive Behavior

Clinic and forensic studies have reported high rates of language impairments in conduct disordered and incarcerated youth. In community samples followed to early adolescence, speech and language impairments have been linked to attention deficits and internalizing problems, rather than conduct problems, delinquency, or aggression. This study examines the young adult antisocial outcomes of speech or language impaired children. Language impaired boys had higher levels of parent-rated delinquency symptoms by age 19 than boys without language impairment, controlled for verbal IQ and for demographic and family variables. Language impaired boys did not differ from controls in self-reported delinquency or aggression symptoms on a standardized checklist; however, language impaired boys reported higher rates of arrests and convictions than controls. Language impairment was not related to aggression or delinquency in girls. We examine alternate models of the interrelationships between language, academics, and behavior, at ages 5, 12, and 19.     

Acetylcholine and olfactory perceptual learning

Olfactory perceptual learning is a relatively long-term, learned increase in perceptual acuity, and has been described in both humans and animals. Data from recent electrophysiological studies have indicated that olfactory perceptual learning may be correlated with changes in odorant receptive fields of neurons in the olfactory bulb and piriform cortex. These changes include enhanced representation of the molecular features of familiar odors by mitral cells in the olfactory bulb, and synthetic coding of multiple coincident odorant features into odor objects by cortical neurons. In this paper, data are reviewed that show the critical role of acetylcholine (Ach) in olfactory system function and plasticity, and cholinergic modulation of olfactory perceptual learning at both the behavioral and cortical level.     

Making your next move: Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and planning a sequence of actions in freely moving monkeys

Prefrontal damage disrupts planning, as measured by disorders of the activities of daily living (Humphreys & Forde, 1998; Shallice & Burgess, 1991). In a monkey model of this form of planning, a variant of the delayed alternation task was performed by freely moving monkeys. In a 16 x 16-ft. testing room, four feeders were located in the middle of each wall. In the north task, monkeys alternated between feeders: west-north-east-north-west, and so forth. In the south task, the alternation sequence was east-south-west-south-east, and so forth. Neuronal activity was recorded during walking along the eight paths, constituting the north and south tasks. To succeed, monkeys had to memorize the alternation rule and monitor both their place in the sequence and the previously made spatially directed action before deciding to walk to a new location to the left or right of the current location. Responsive dorsolateral prefrontal neurons are strikingly selective. Sustained neuronal activity reflects the spatial direction of an ongoing or upcoming response. It is important that such selective responses occur in one but not both tasks, even though the movements are exactly the same in both tasks and at each location. We suggest that selective neuronal activity is tuned through learning and reflects the fundamental units of a planning mechanism: Individual neurons encode specific components of a sequence of behavioral actions and their temporal order. Populations of such neurons represent all the steps necessary to perform the north and south tasks. The sustained activity of these neurons suggests that planning and working memory mechanisms are integrated.     

Active versus passive learning and testing in a complex outside built environment

A review of the evidence on active and passive learning in virtual environments (VEs) suggests that both conditions have shown superiority under some conditions of learning and testing, but there is no consistent outcome pattern. Measures of transfer between virtual and real environments have also revealed a variety of outcomes. Following either active or passive learning in a VE, experiment 1 assessed measures of orientation and distance estimation in that VE and in a real-world equivalent environment. On measures of direct and relative distance, more accurate estimates were found for active than passive VE explorers. A suggestion was also noted for the orientation estimates to benefit from real-world rather than VE testing. With an improvement to the procedure, experiment 2 found similar real versus virtual orientation judgements, suggesting that an opportunity for active learning during the test procedure probably influenced orientation measures in experiment 1. We conclude that the effects of interactivity are unreliable and vary with the measures used, and that testing in virtual and real environments leads to similar outcomes.     

Virtual visiting seminar replaces verbatim seminar in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE)

The article addresses the question of the value of the virtual visiting seminar compared to the verbatim seminar in a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Unit. A Virtual Visit occurs when a volunteer allows a CPE student to engage them in a pastoral visit with the expressed purpose of providing feedback to the student. The effectiveness of the virtual visiting seminar was monitored by a Site Review Team, two independent expert witnesses, by students who have experienced both learning tools, and the Education Sub Committee of the Pastoral Care Advisory Committee. The results point to advantages of the virtual visiting seminar over the verbatim seminar.     

Heightened subjective experience of depression in borderline personality disorder

Despite the frequent comorbidity of major depression and borderline personality disorder (BPD), limited research has examined what effect this comorbidity has on the severity, course, and presentation of depression. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the severity of major depressive disorder (MDD) in the context of comorbid borderline personality disorder (BPD) differs from MDD when comorbid BPD is not present and to determine whether different measures of depression yield convergent findings. Sixty patients diagnosed with DSM-IV MDD participated in this study. Twenty-nine were diagnosed with DSM-IV BPD, while the remaining 31 had no Axis II diagnosis. Depression was evaluated with both clinician (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression) and self-report (Beck Depression Inventory) ratings. While the two groups were rated as similarly depressed by clinicians on the overall rating and the factor scores, the MDD/BPD group reported more severe depressive symptoms on the self-report measure. This difference was significant even after controlling for clinician-rated severity. Gender interacted with diagnosis, males in the BPD group showed the largest discrepancies between clinician ratings and self-reports. Posthoc analyses of HDRS factors with the BDI showed that the clinicianrated cognitive disturbance and retardation factors were correlated with self-rated severity overall. Within subgroups, only the retardation factor was correlated with the BDI. Our results suggest that while depressed individuals with and without BPD may be rated as similarly depressed when assessed with objective rating methods, the subjective experience of the depression may be rated as more intense or severe by patients with comorbid BPD. The mechanism underlying this effect remains unknown, and requires further research.     

Selective preference in visual fixation away from negative images in old age? An eye-tracking study

Recent studies have suggested that older individuals selectively forget negative information. However, findings on a positivity effect in the attention of older adults have been more mixed. In the current study, eye tracking was used to record visual fixation in nearly real-time to investigate whether older individuals show a positivity effect in their visual attention to emotional information. Young and old individuals (N = 64) viewed pairs of synthetic faces that included the same face in a nonemotional expression and in 1 of 4 emotional expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, or fear). Gaze patterns were recorded as individuals viewed the face pairs. Older adults showed an attentional preference toward happy faces and away from angry ones; the only preference shown by young adults was toward afraid faces. The age groups were not different in overall cognitive functioning, suggesting that these attentional differences are specific and motivated rather than due to general cognitive change with age.