‘And when you were a child?’: how therapists working with parents alongside individual child psychotherapy bring the past into their work

When a child is offered psychotherapy, it is common that regular meetings will be offered to the parents. However, there are debates in the literature about the degree to which such parent work should include a focus on the parents’ own childhood experiences. This study aimed to examine the way that those offering parent work as part of a study evaluating the treatment of adolescent depression dealt with this issue in their work with parents, both in the study and in routine clinical practice. Design: five therapists were interviewed on the subject of working with parents’ childhood experiences within parent work parallel to child psychotherapy. Data were analysed qualitatively, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Findings: participants described the need to consider the different parameters of this work to individual adult therapy; in addition, participants felt that it was necessary to negotiate permission to work on the parents’ childhood experiences. They also spoke of making use of insight into the repetition of the parents’ history, the analysis of parental projections and offering containment within the relationship; this varies from the ‘transference work’ of individual therapy and a different style of interpretation was described. Conclusions: there is a need to give more attention to the neglected field of working with parents alongside individual child psychotherapy, especially at a time when such work is under threat within many public services. There are particular technical issues related to work with parents’ own childhood histories that are different to how one might work in individual therapy with a parent.     

Children’s Gender Stereotypes Through Drawings of Emotional Faces: Do Boys Draw Angrier Faces than Girls?

The present study was designed to examine the impact of display rules and gender-emotion stereotypes on French children’s depiction of sadness and anger in their drawings of a human face. Participants were 172 school-aged French children (74 boys and 98 girls), who attended state schools in a middle-class district of a southern French city. The exact age range was as followed: 6 years 2 months to 8 years 1 month. They were asked to draw the emotion felt by a character (either male or female) after being told a scenario eliciting sadness and a scenario eliciting anger. By never mentioning the emotion felt by the character, we expected children’s interpretation of these scenarios to be therefore influenced by their own gender and/or by the character’s gender. Results indicate that anger is depicted by more boys than girls in response to the angry scenario, for male as well as for female characters. Furthermore, among the children who did depict anger, the expressive intensity of the drawings was scored lower for children who were presented the feminine character than for children who were presented the masculine character. However, no effect of gender was found on the drawings produced in response to the sad scenario. These results are discussed in terms of the influence of display rules and gender-emotion stereotypes on children. We also suggest some methodological and clinical implications.     

Understanding the impact of HIV diagnosis amongst gay men in Scotland: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

Objectives: Although a wide literature details the psychological impact of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) diagnosis, it predates the introduction of effective treatment for HIV (i.e. anti-retroviral therapies, ARTs). This article explores the psychological impact of HIV diagnosis in post-ART accounts. This is important, given the recent policy developments which focus upon increasing HIV testing and thus diagnoses.

Design: This study presents a qualitative exploration of the experiential accounts of HIV-positive gay men living in Scotland. A total of 14 HIV-positive gay men took part in open-ended interviews.

Methods: Interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to identify recurrent themes across the interviews.

Results: Our analysis focuses upon the participants’ struggles in adjusting to their HIV status. Diagnosis was a deeply shocking and unexpected experience. Stigma and fear of prejudice dominated their accounts. HIV was understood, variously, as a shameful, fatal and life-changing condition. Overall, within these accounts there was little sense of HIV normalisation.

Conclusions: In Scotland, where HIV prevalence is low, and where no accessible HIV-positive sub-culture exists, there is on-going psychological distress and morbidity amongst gay men testing HIV positive. As HIV-related policy increasingly focuses on increasing rates of antibody testing, there is a need to reduce the psychosocial costs associated with HIV-positive diagnoses.     

Juggling roles and expectations: dilemmas faced by women talking to relatives about cancer and genetic testing

Health professionals do not inform their patients’ kin about BRCA1/2 test results or genetic testing without their written consent. Thus, the onus is on women attending genetic counselling to talk to relatives about the family history and their potential increased risk. This communication process within the family is largely unexplored and provides the focus of the present study. Fifteen healthy women attending a genetics clinic for predictive testing were interviewed prior to receiving their test result and again 6 months later. A grounded theory approach was used. Findings illustrate the dilemmas women faced in juggling social roles and expectations, which had an impact on communication within the family in the context of predictive genetic testing. Tensions between responsibilities towards themselves and others and their fulfilment of social roles had an impact on who women informed and on how they did so. These factors should be considered when assigning patients the role of information provider.     

Life design counselling effects on the career adaptability of learners in a selective independent school setting

This collective case study applied life design counselling to augment the career adaptability of learners in a South African independent school setting. Five purposively selected learners attending Grade 11 (age range: 16–18) completed eight group-based life design counselling sessions. Data on their career adaptability pre- and post-intervention were gathered from sessional notes. The data were thematically analysed. Following the intervention the participants displayed improved career adaptability as evidenced by their demonstrated efforts to address aspects related to career concern, control, curiosity and confidence. Life design counselling appeared to have a positive effect on the career adaptability of learners in an independent school setting.     

Cue competition effects in the planarian

The learning abilities of planarian worms (Dugesia tigrina) were assessed by using a number of Pavlovian conditioning paradigms. Experiment 1 showed that planaria were susceptible to basic conditioning in that they readily developed a conditioned response to a change in ambient luminance when it was consistently paired with an electric shock over a number of trials. In Experiment 2, the change in luminance was presented in a compound with a vibration stimulus during conditioning. Subsequent tests revealed poor conditioning of the elements compared with control groups in which the animals were conditioned in the presence of the elements alone, an instance of overshadowing. In Experiment 3, pre-training of one of the elements before compound conditioning resulted in blocking of learning about the other element. These results add to other studies that have reported cue competition effects in animal species belonging to different phyla (chordate, mollusk, arthropod), suggesting that learning in these phyla could be ruled by similar principles. The results are discussed adopting an evolutionary-comparative approach.     

Structural equation modelling of human judgement

Structural equation modelling (SEM) is outlined and compared with two non-linear alternatives, artificial neural networks and “fast and frugal” models. One particular non-linear decision-making situation is discussed, that exemplified by a lexicographic semi-order. We illustrate the use of SEM on a dataset derived from 539 volunteers' responses to questions about food-related risks. Our conclusion is that SEM is a useful member of the armoury of techniques available to the student of human judgement: it subsumes several multivariate statistical techniques and permits their flexible combination, and it provides robust goodness-of-fit statistics and is available in (generally) easy-to-use computer packages. Although the number of tasks for which SEM provides a persuasive psychological model is small, it is very useful in identifying the important variables and their inter-relations that contribute to task performance, and thus can constitute a valuable intermediate staging point between raw data and a fully fledged psychological theory.     

Teaching Exodus as “Problem Text”

This essay explores how one might use the “problem” of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart as a learning opportunity in the classroom. The author identifies two pedagogical aims: (1) cultivating more sophisticated, critical readers of the Bible; and (2) helping students reflect on the contextual nature of interpretation. The essay discusses in some detail various ways of teaching the text, including an exercise in close reading, examination of sources, and a selective study of the history of interpretation. It also explores various lessons to be learned from these exercises, and addresses applicability of the approaches to other teaching contexts. An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the “Problem Texts” group of the consultation “Teaching the Bible in the 21st Century,” held at the Wabash Center in Crawfordsville, Indiana.     

The Relation of Parental Emotionality and Related Dispositional Traits to Parental Expression of Emotion and Children's Social Functioning

The purpose of this study was to test relations between parental temperamental emotionality and regulation or related personality characteristics and parental behavior, children's regulation, and children's social functioning. Mothers and fathers reported on their own personality and/or temperament and expressivity in the family (mothers only); parents and teachers rated children (71 girls and 99 boys; M age = 73 months) on their temperamental regulation, social competence, and problem behavior. Mothers also were observed interacting with their child, and behavioral measures of children's regulation were obtained. In general, high parental regulation and low negative emotionality were associated with positive developmental outcomes in children and more positive parental behaviors, and mothers' expression of positive emotion in the family mediated some of the relations of their dispositions to children's socioemotional functioning.     

Attention to Sex in Psychological Research as Related to Journal Policy and Author Sex

From 1969 to 1974, Developmental Psychology, but not Child Development , specified that authors analyze for sex differences. The authors examined 503 studies published in Child Development and Developmental Psychology in 1971 and 1975. Sex of senior author, subjects and experimenter(s) were recorded for each study. If subjects of both sexes were used, the presence or absence of the following were noted: (a) analysis of sex differences; (b) hypotheses regarding sex differences; (c) mention of subjects' sex in the abstract. For single-sex-subject studies, mention of subjects' sex in the discussion or conclusion was noted. Using these data as dependent variables, chi-square analyses were performed comparing: (a) the two journals; (b) 1971 and 1975 authors; and (c) male and female authors. The findings were: (a) More attention was paid to sex in Developmental Psychology when the journal had a written editorial policy regarding this factor; (b) Evidence was mixed for increasing awareness of sex as a variable between 1971 and 1975; (c) Female authors were more aware of sex than were male authors in 1971 but not in 1975; (d) In both years, authors used own-sex subjects and experimenters more than those of the opposite sex; (e) Developmental psychologists, as compared to psychologists in other areas previously examined, were more sensitive to sex as a variable.