'To walk the last bit on my own' - narcissistic independence or identification with good objects: issues of loss for a 13-year-old who had an amputation

This paper describes two years of psychotherapy with Michael, a 13-year-old boy who had undergone a recent emergency amputation of his leg and hip for bone cancer. The work follows Michael's struggle with the enormity of the loss, in the face of his, as well as the system's, use of denial. The amputation as an 'attack' on his physical and emotional autonomy strikes at his early adolescent development. The therapeutic process is aided by his capacity 'to go back to the unhappiness'. The therapy develops from his initial shock, to despair and self-blame, as he struggles with a tendency - in the middle period of the therapy - to lose his mind as well as his leg in a retreat to withdrawal and mindlessness, or to mania. He struggles between an omnipotent, at times self-destructive, wish to 'go it alone', versus a capacity to feel sad and to value life. His capacity to think about the trauma and to find meaning emerges. The paper raises questions about whether some trauma can ever be fully assimilated, and whether, for Michael, the mourning process could lead to a reintegrated sense of self and of a 'psychic intactness', dependent on the survival of his good 'internal couple'. Hospital and ward-based child psychotherapy and its limitations are explored.     

A survey of clergy practices associated with premarital financial counseling

The purpose of this exploratory study was to gain an understanding of the state of clergy-led premarital financial counseling. Clergy respondents (n = 223) indicated that they often include a financial component in their formal premarital counseling. The most frequently discussed financial topics are budgeting, managing debt and credit, and saving. The most frequently cited obstacles to providing premarital financial counseling are lack of time and lack of subject matter expertise.     

Children's 5-HTTLPR genotype moderates the link between maternal criticism and attentional biases specifically for facial displays of anger

Theorists have proposed that negative experiences in childhood may contribute to the development of experience-specific information-processing biases, including attentional biases. There are also clear genetic influences on cognitive processes, with evidence that polymorphisms in specific candidate genes may moderate the impact of environmental stress on attentional biases (e.g., a functional polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene; 5-HTTLPR). In the current study, we tested a gene×environment (G×E) model of risk for attentional biases. We hypothesised that children whose mothers exhibit high levels of expressed emotion criticism (EE-Crit) would display attentional biases specifically for angry, but not happy or sad, faces, and that this link would be stronger among children carrying one or two copies of the 5-HTTLPR short allele than among those homozygous for the long allele. Results generally supported these hypotheses, though we found that carriers of the 5-HTTLPR short allele who also had a critical mother exhibited attentional avoidance of angry faces rather than preferential attention.     

Shades of emotion: What the addition of sunglasses or masks to faces reveals about the development of facial expression processing

Three studies investigated developmental changes in facial expression processing, between 3years-of-age and adulthood. For adults and older children, the addition of sunglasses to upright faces caused an equivalent decrement in performance to face inversion. However, younger children showed better classification of expressions of faces wearing sunglasses than children who saw the same faces un-occluded. When the mouth area was occluded with a mask, children under nine years showed no impairment in expression classification, relative to un-occluded faces. An early selective focus of attention on the eyes may be optimal for socialization, but mediate against accurate expression classification. The data support a model in which a threshold level of attentional control must be reached before children can develop adult-like configural processing skills and be flexible in their use of face- processing strategies.     

The erosive effects of racism: reduced self-control mediates the relation between perceived racial discrimination and substance use in African American adolescents

Perceived racial discrimination, self-control, anger, and either substance use or use cognitions were assessed in 2 studies conducted with samples of African American adolescents. The primary goal was to examine the relation between discrimination and self-control over time; a 2nd goal was to determine whether that relation mediates the link between discrimination and substance use found in previous research. Study 1, which included a latent growth curve analysis with 3 waves of data, indicated that experience with discrimination (from age 10 years to age 18 years) was associated with reduced self-control, which then predicted increased substance use. Additional analyses indicated anger was also a mediator of this discrimination to use relation. Study 2, which was experimental, showed that envisioning an experience involving discrimination was associated with an increase in substance-related responses to double entendre words (e.g., pot, roach) in a word association task, especially for participants who were low in dispositional self-control. The effect was again mediated by reports of anger. Thus, the "double mediation" pattern was discrimination → more anger and reduced self-control → increased substance use and/or substance cognitions. Results are discussed in terms of the long-term impact of discrimination on self-control and health behavior. Implications for interventions aimed at ameliorating the negative effects of discrimination and low self-control on health are also discussed.     

Coping with racial discrimination: The role of substance use

Three studies tested the hypothesis that the relation between perceived racial discrimination and substance use reported in previous research is moderated by use of substances as a coping mechanism. Studies 1 and 2 were experimental studies of African American adolescents' and young adults' reactions to a discrimination experience. Results revealed that those who endorsed substance use-as-coping reported more willingness to use substances after experiencing discrimination. Study 3 was a prospective study of the relation between perceived discrimination and substance use over an 8-year period in African American adolescents. Results demonstrated that discrimination is associated with increases in substance use, but only among adolescents who endorse substance use-as-coping. Together, these three studies provide evidence that experiencing discrimination has both short- and long-term detrimental effects on African Americans' substance use, but significantly more so for those who adopt a pattern of using substances as a coping mechanism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Emotional information in body and background hampers recognition memory for faces

Emotional influences on memory for events have long been documented yet surprisingly little is known about how emotional signals conveyed by contextual cues influence memory for face identity. This study investigated how positively and negatively valenced contextual emotion cues conveyed by body expressions or background scenes influence face memory. The results provide evidence of emotional context influence on face recognition memory and show that faces encoded in emotional (either fearful or happy) contexts (either the body or background scene) are less well recognized than faces encoded in neutral contexts and this effect is larger for body context than for scene context. The findings are compatible with the hypothesis that emotional signals in visual scenes trigger orienting responses which may lead to a less elaborate processing of featural details like the identity of a face, in turn resulting in a decreased facial recognition memory.     

Empowering the Older Adult Through Folklore

An opportunity exists for those working with older adults in nursing homes to significantly encourage independence in the older adult using a creative approach. The use of folklore is suggested as a means for assisting the older adult toward a reconnection with the individuation process.