Counseling Issues for Adult Women in Career Transition

This article addresses current psychosocial issues facing women in career transition and the implications of those issues for career counselors. Specifically, psychosocial developmental trajectories, the roles of family and relationships, the importance of underlying physical and mental health issues, and sociocultural and contextual stressors are relevant for women in the midst of career change. The author discusses how career counselors can prepare for this complexity and addresses clients' current economic and social milieus. A checklist is provided to aid the career counselor in addressing the multiple issues that a new client brings to the 1st counseling encounter.     

Fibromyalgia: the role of sleep in affect and in negative event reactivity and recovery

OBJECTIVE: Fibromyalgia (FM) syndrome is a chronic pain condition characterized by diffuse muscle pain, increased negative mood, and sleep disturbance. Until recently, sleep disturbance in persons with FM has been modeled as the result of the disease process or its associated pain. The current study examined sleep disturbance (i.e., sleep duration and sleep quality) as a predictor of daily affect, stress reactivity, and stress recovery. DESIGN AND MEASURES: A hybrid of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment methodology was used to evaluate the psychosocial functioning of 89 women with FM. Participants recorded numeric ratings of pain, fatigue, and positive and negative affect 3 times throughout the day for 30 consecutive days. At the end of each day, participants completed daily diary records of positive and negative life events. In addition, participants reported on their sleep duration and sleep quality each morning. RESULTS: After accounting for the effects of positive events, negative events, and pain on daily affect scores, it was found that sleep duration and quality were prospectively related to affect and fatigue. Furthermore, the effects of inadequate sleep on negative affect were cumulative. In addition, an inadequate amount of sleep prevented affective recovery from days with a high number of negative events. CONCLUSIONS: These results lend support to the hypothesis that sleep is a component of allostatic load and has an upstream role in daily functioning.     

Eye-movement patterns in face recognition are associated with cognitive decline in older adults

The Hidden Markov Modeling approach for eye-movement data analysis is able to quantitatively assess differences and similarities among individual patterns. Here we applied this approach to examine the relationships between eye-movement patterns in face recognition and age-related cognitive decline. We found that significantly more older than young adults adopted “holistic” patterns, in which most eye fixations landed around the face center, as opposed to “analytic” patterns, in which eye movements switched among the two eyes and the face center. Participants showing analytic patterns had better performance than those with holistic patterns regardless of age. Interestingly, older adults with lower cognitive status (as assessed by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment), particularly in executive and visual attention functioning (as assessed by Tower of London and Trail Making Tests) were associated with a higher likelihood of holistic patterns. This result suggests the possibility of using eye movements as an easily deployable screening assessment for cognitive decline in older adults.     

Emotion-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Youth with Anxiety Disorders: A Randomized Trial

Difficulties with emotion regulation are a core feature of anxiety disorders (ADs) in children and adults. Interventions with a specific focus on emotion regulation are gaining empirical support. Yet, no studies to date have compared the relative efficacy of such interventions to existing evidence-based treatments. Such comparisons are necessary to determine whether emotion-focused treatments might be more effective for youth exhibiting broad emotion-regulation difficulties at pretreatment. This study examined an emotion-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (ECBT) protocol in comparison to traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in a sample of children with a primary anxiety disorder diagnosis. Moderation analyses examined whether children with higher levels of emotion dysregulation at pretreatment would show greater levels of improvement in ECBT than CBT. Ninety-two youth ages 7 to 12 years (58% male) with a primary diagnosis of separation anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or social phobia were included. Participants were randomly assigned to ECBT or CBT. Results showed that youth in both conditions demonstrated similar improvements in emotion regulation and that pretreatment levels of emotion dysregulation did not moderate treatment outcomes. Additional analyses showed that ECBT and CBT were similarly effective on diagnostic, severity, and improvement measures. Future work is needed to further explore the ways that emotion regulation is related to treatment outcome for anxious youth.