A randomized trial of individual tutoring for elementary school children with reading and behavior difficulties

Children in Grades K-5, selected for reading and behavior problems, received individual tutoring in a program which aimed to detail a hierarchy of reading skills, locate the point on the hierarchy at which each child should work, and provide enthusiastic social reinforcement for successes. Children were randomly assigned to higher or lower frequency tutoring (one 45-min. session every 1.6 days vs every 8.3 days). The higher frequency group progressed significantly faster in reading than the lower frequency group. Both groups progressed much faster during the time of the intervention than they had before tutoring. Before tutoring, both groups had progressed at about 0.5 grade per year; during tutoring, the higher frequency group progressed at 1.5 grade per year and the lower frequency group at 1.1 grade per year. The subsets of children with verbal ability scores one or two standard deviations below the population mean, as assessed on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, still progressed at average rates of 1.2 grade per year during tutoring. The amount of work students accomplished on a sounding and blending drill predicted reading progress. The intervention cost an average of 1,156 dollars per student per year.     

Differential effects of arousal in positive and negative autobiographical memories

Autobiographical memories are characterised by a range of emotions and emotional reactions. Recent research has demonstrated that differences in emotional valence (positive vs. negative emotion) and arousal (the degree of emotional intensity) differentially influence the retrieved memory narrative. Although the mnemonic effects of valence and arousal have both been heavily studied, it is currently unclear whether the effects of emotional arousal are equivalent for positive and negative autobiographical events. In the current study, multilevel models were used to examine differential effects of emotional valence and arousal on the richness of autobiographical memory retrieval both between and within subjects. Thirty-four young adults were asked to retrieve personal autobiographical memories associated with popular musical cues and to rate the valence, arousal and richness of these events. The multilevel analyses identified independent influences of valence and intensity upon retrieval characteristics at the within- and between-subject levels. In addition, the within-subject interactions between valence and arousal highlighted differential effects of arousal for positive and negative memories. These findings have important implications for future studies of emotion and memory, highlighting the importance of considering both valence and arousal when examining the role emotion plays in the richness of memory representation.     

Overlapping neural substrates between intentional and incidental down-regulation of negative emotions

Emotion regulation can be achieved in various ways, but few studies have evaluated the extent to which the neurocognitive substrates of these distinct operations overlap. In the study reported here, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure activity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex of 10 participants who completed two independent tasks of emotion regulation-reappraisal, measuring intentional emotion regulation, and affect labeling, measuring incidental emotion regulation-with the objective of identifying potential overlap in the neural substrates underlying each task. Analyses focused on a priori regions of interest in the amygdala and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). For both tasks, fMRI showed decreased amygdala activation during emotion regulation compared with emotion conditions. During reappraisal, this decrease in amygdala activation was accompanied by a proportional decrease in emotional intensity ratings; during affect labeling, the decrease in amygdala activation correlated with self-reported aggression. Importantly, across participants, the magnitude of decrease in amygdala activation during reappraisal correlated with the magnitude of decrease during affect labeling, even though the tasks were administered on separate days, and values indexing amygdala activation during each task were extracted independently of one another. In addition, IFG-amygdala connectivity, assessed via psychophysiological interaction analysis, overlapped between tasks in two regions within the right IFG. The results suggest that the two tasks recruit overlapping regions of prefrontal cortex, resulting in similar reductions in amygdala activation, regardless of the strategy employed. Intentional and incidental forms of emotion regulation, despite their phenomenological differences, may therefore converge on a common neurocognitive pathway.     

Rankian Will

Otto Rank (1884–1939) served as Freud's closest partner in the psychoanalytic movement from 1906 to 1926. From 1923 on, Rank, initially with Ferenczi, focused on making analysis more therapeutic, emphasizing current experience in the session over historical exploration and interpretation. Rank settled on will as a missing factor, and wrote extensively about it after the break with Freud in 1926, when he moved to Paris. He emphasized the here-and-now, redefined “resistance” as a positive aspect of counter-will, and suggested a time limit for analysis. Ousted from analytic circles in 1930, he eventually moved to New York, continuing to treat patients and teach until his unexpected death at 55 in 1939. After decades of obscurity, Rank has gained readers and therapists whose orientation is interpersonal, client-centered, relational, humanistic, or existential. His influence on post-Freudian ego-psychology is finally being acknowledged as are his ideas about creativity, will, life-fear and death-fear, guilt, and ethics.     

Toward a model for assessing level of personality functioning in DSM-5, part I: a review of theory and methods

Personality disorders are associated with fundamental disturbances of self and interpersonal relations, problems that vary in severity within and across disorders. This review surveyed clinician-rated measures of personality psychopathology that focus on self-other dimensions to explore the feasibility and utility of constructing a scale of severity of impairment in personality functioning for DSM-5. Robust elements of the instruments were considered in creating a continuum of personality functioning based on aspects of identity, self-direction, empathy, and intimacy. Building on preliminary findings (Morey et al., 2011 /this issue), the proposed Levels of Personality Functioning will be subjected to extensive empirical testing in the DSM-5 field trials and elsewhere. The resulting version of this severity measure is expected to have clinical utility in identifying personality psychopathology, planning treatment, building the therapeutic alliance, and studying treatment course and outcome.     

Children's word fluency strategies

Two word fluency tasks, the FAS letter fluency task and the "animal" semantic fluency task, were administered to 130 healthy Swedish-speaking children between 6 and 15 years of age. The main aim was to gather normative data on these word fluency tasks for Swedish-speaking children. Another purpose was to examine the switching and clustering strategies used, along with the occurrence of erroneous responses, in relation to demographic data and number of words retrieved. Both phonological and semantic analyses of switching and clustering were conducted. Higher age was found to be related to a more effective use of phonological and semantic switching and clustering strategies. The reference data resulting from this study may be of clinical value in examinations of children with various diagnoses, including language impairment.