Tackling Acute Cases of School Bullying in the KiVa Anti-Bullying Program: A Comparison of Two Approaches

Whether cases of bullying should be handled in a direct, condemning mode or in a manner that does not involve blaming the perpetrator is a controversial issue among school professionals. This study compares the effectiveness of a Confronting Approach where the bully is openly told that his behavior must cease immediately to a Non-Confronting Approach where the adult shares his concern about the victim with the bully and invites him to provide suggestions on what could improve the situation. We analysed 339 cases of bullying involving 314 children from grades 1 to 9 (mean age?=?11.95). Cases were handled in 65 schools as part of the implementation of the KiVa anti-bullying program. In each school, a team of three teachers addressed cases coming to their attention by organizing discussions with the bullies using either a Confronting or a Non-Confronting Approach; schools were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions. Victims reported that bullying stopped in 78 % of the cases. Logistic regression analyses indicated that neither approach was overall more effective than the other, controlling for grade level, duration of victimization and type of aggression. The Confronting Approach worked better than the Non-Confronting Approach in secondary school (grades 7 to 9), but not in primary school (grades 1 to 6). The Confronting Approach was more successful than the Non-Confronting Approach in cases of short-term victimization, but not in cases of long-term victimization. The type of aggression used did not moderate the effectiveness of either approach.     

Wittgenstein and the Expression of Feelings in Psychotherapy

Effective psychotherapy is often held to involve the expression of feelings. Within the person‐centred approach, this view has been especially emphasised by Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin. I am concerned with the question of why the expression of feelings can be therapeutically effective. Many psychotherapists picture feelings as “inner experiences” for which the client tries to find appropriate words, but the difficulties with this picture, which were highlighted by Wittgenstein, seem to call for a very different approach. Here, I develop a Wittgensteinian account of the expression of feelings that avoids the difficulties to which Wittgenstein draws attention.     

Alpha to Omega: A Neurological Analysis of Marital Conflict in a Pilot Study

Although the linkage between health and marriage has been noted (e.g., Hayward and Gorman in Demography 41:87–107. doi:10.1353/dem.2004.0005, 2004; Kaplan and Kronick in J Epidemiol Community Health 60:760–765. doi:10.1136/jech.2005.037606, 2006; Schoenborn in Marital status and health: United States, 1999–2002. Advance data from vital and health statistics. National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, MD, 2004), understanding the connection between neurological and behavioral phenomena in marital relationships has yet to be tackled. This pilot study attempted to address this limitation by analyzing electrical brain activity during a conflict interaction between married couples. Results generally supported the work of Lazarus (Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991) and Harmon-Jones et al. (J Pers Soc Psychol 82:610–618. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.82.4.610, 2002); individuals that felt like they were in an action-possible situation revealed relatively higher left hemispheric activity in the frontal region of the brain.     

Electrical Brain Activity,Family Functioning,and Parent–Adolescent Conflict Communication

As family conflict tends to escalate during the adolescent years, the subsequent effects of adolescence on parent–child dynamics are systemically experienced, both intra- and inter-personally. As such, widening the scope of literature targeted towards better understanding the parent–adolescent conflict relationship is merited. To offer a more gestalt view of parent–adolescent conflict processes, the present study takes a biopsychosocial view of the mother–father–adolescent relationship by considering electrical brain activity using electroencephalography technology. Specifically, electrical brain activity was recorded during two problem-solving family discussions between a mother, father, and adolescent child. Data is analyzed from a pilot study of 11 triads, for a total of 33 participants, examining the statistical relationships between brain waves and self-reported measures of family functioning and distress. Findings suggest that hemispheric lateralization occurs during parent–adolescent problem-solving discussions thus reminding therapists of the importance in using a biopsychosocial lens when assisting families.     

The Predictive Validity of Ideal Partner Preferences in Relationship Formation: What We Know,What We Don't Know,and Why It Matters

A great deal of research on interpersonal attraction implicitly assumes that stated ideal partner preferences guide the mate selection, and therefore relationship formation, process. Nevertheless, recent research has yielded contradictory results. Whereas some research has failed to demonstrate that ideal partner preferences influence attraction to actual potential romantic partners, other studies have provided empirical evidence for the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences following interactions with potential romantic partners. A new meta‐analysis on the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences concluded that people may not preferentially pursue potential partners that more closely match their stated preferences. This conclusion has significant implications for several empirical literatures that have relied on self‐reported ideal partner preferences to test hypotheses. We demonstrate, however, that the majority of the research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences, and thus research included in this meta‐analysis, focuses on interpersonal attraction or later relationship processes and not on individuals transitioning into actual new relationships. We suggest that research that directly focuses on the transition into actual relationships is needed before firm conclusions can be made regarding the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences in the formation of new relationships.     

Perceptual hysteresis in the judgment of auditory pitch shift

Perceptual hysteresis can be defined as the enduring influence of the recent past on current perception. Here, hysteresis was investigated in a basic auditory task: pitch comparisons between successive tones. On each trial, listeners were presented with pairs of tones and asked to report the direction of subjective pitch shift, as either “up” or “down.” All tones were complexes known as Shepard tones (Shepard, 1964), which comprise several frequency components at octave multiples of a base frequency. The results showed that perceptual judgments were determined both by stimulus-related factors (the interval ratio between the base frequencies within a pair) and by recent context (the intervals in the two previous trials). When tones were presented in ordered sequences, for which the frequency interval between tones was varied in a progressive manner, strong hysteresis was found. In particular, ambiguous stimuli that led to equal probabilities of “up” and “down” responses within a randomized context were almost fully determined within an ordered context. Moreover, hysteresis did not act on the direction of the reported pitch shift, but rather on the perceptual representation of each tone. Thus, hysteresis could be observed within sequences in which listeners varied between “up” and “down” responses, enabling us to largely rule out confounds related to response bias. The strength of the perceptual hysteresis observed suggests that the ongoing context may have a substantial influence on fundamental aspects of auditory perception, such as how we perceive the changes in pitch between successive sounds.     

Keith Lehrer on Compatibilism

Keith Lehrer has been publishing on free will and compatiblism since 1960. Our concern here is to present an account of the development on his work on the subject.     

Support groups for parents with an adult child suffering from bipolar disorder

Confronted with the disconcerting behaviour exhibited by their children, parents of bipolar patients are in severe distress. Research focuses on the study of the ‘burden’ that the pathology puts on caregivers, owing to their experience of depression, sometimes combined with the presence of hostile attitudes and negative affects. In France, parents of adult patients encounter an initial specific difficulty: they are not systematically included in the care management system. Thanks to the initiative of an association of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, the authors set up a psychoanalytic support group for the parents of ‘bipolar’ adults. The diagnosis of a bipolar disorder is established by a psychiatrist within a medical structure. Support groups for parents do exist in France, but their experiences have not led to scientific publications on this specific topic. Existing publications focus on other types of pathology and other therapeutic approaches. In this article, we will highlight how this type of psychoanalytic support group, with operating rules based on the theoretical work of Anzieu, can help parents of patients with bipolar disorders. Group participants accepted the principle of a research study that maintained their anonymity. We collected and analysed qualitative data from the first year of the group, so we highlight the specific difficulties of these parents, faced with chronic disease. The relevance of our qualitative study also resides in the data collected over a period of time, enabling us to see the progress made, and encouraging us to reflect on the place of psychoanalytic groups for parents, as well as on the care management of this pathology.     

Executive Functions in Children and Adolescents with Turner Syndrome: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Turner syndrome (TS) is a genetic disorder, affecting 1/2500 to 1/3000 live female births, induced by partial or total deletion of one X chromosome. The neurocognitive profile of girls with TS is characterized by a normal Verbal IQ and weaknesses in visual-spatial, mathematics, and social cognitive domains. Executive functions (EFs) impairments have also been reported in these young patients. However, methodological differences across studies do not allow determination of which EFs are impaired and what is the magnitude of these impairments. The aim of this review was to clarify the EF profile of children and adolescents with TS. Sixteen samples, from thirteen studies, were included in the current meta-analysis. EFs measures used in these studies were classified into working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, or higher-order EFs tasks in accordance with Diamond’s model, Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168 (2013). Results confirmed that girls with TS had significant executive impairments with effect sizes varying from small (inhibitory control) to medium (cognitive flexibility) and large (working memory, higher-order EFs). Analyses by task revealed that cognitive inhibition may be more impaired than the other inhibitory control abilities. Heterogeneity across cognitive flexibility measures was also highlighted. Between-sample heterogeneity was observed for three tasks and the impact of participants’ characteristics on EFs was discussed. This meta-analysis confirms the necessity to assess, in patients living with TS, each EF by combining both visual and verbal tasks. Results also underline that, when studying girls with TS’ executive profile, it is important to explore the impact of moderator variables, such as IQ, parental socio-economic status, TS karyotype, psychiatric comorbidities, and hormonal treatment status.