Notes on infant psychotherapy

The idea of „infant psychotherapy”︁ is easily misunderstood, especially by those who associate psychiatry with images of crazy behavior. Nevertheless, there is a type of activity conducted by adults with infants, discussed with increasing frequency in recent literature, which is best understood in an analogy with adult psychotherapy. This activity may be called infant psychotherapy or infant-centered activity. Briefly, it consists of encouraging the infant to take the lead, and asking the adult in charge to follow or „track”︁ the infant's behavior as unobtrusively as possible. This is more easily said than done, and the present work tries to show why this is so. A discussion of the maternal-infant program at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Centre accompanies the observations.     

The perception of interleaved melodies

If the notes of two melodies whose pitch ranges do not overlap are interleaved in time so that successive tones come from the different melodies, the resulting sequence of tones is perceptually divided into groups that correspond to the two melodies. Such “melodic fission” demonstrates perceptual grouping based on pitch alone, and has been used extensively in music.Experiment I showed that the identification of interleaved pairs of familiar melodies is possible if their pitch ranges do not overlap, but difficult otherwise. A short-term recognition-memory paradigm (Expt II) showed that interleaving a “background” melody with an unfamiliar melody interferes with same-different judgments regardless of the separation of their pitch ranges, but that range separation attenuates the interference effect. When pitch ranges overlap, listeners can overcome the interference effect and recognize a familiar target melody if the target is prespecified, thereby permitting them to search actively for it (Expt III). But familiarity or prespecification of the interleaved background melody appears not to reduce its interfering effects on same-different judgments concerning unfamiliar target melodies (Expt IV).     

Recognition of melodic transformations: Inversion,retrograde, and retrograde inversion

The melodic transformations of inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion occur in pieces of music. An important question is whether such manipulations of melodic material are perceptually accessible to the listener. This study used a short-term recognition-memory paradigm and found that in the easier conditions all these transformations were recognized with better than chance accuracy. The ascending order of difficulty was: inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion. There was no evidence that listeners distinguish between transforms that preserve the exact interval relationships of the standard stimulus and those that merely preserve its contour (pattern of ups and downs). In view of the order of difficulty of the transforms, two theoretical explanations of performance are possible (1) Listeners may perform the mental transformation required by the recognition task on a representation of the vector of pitches in the standard—an operation that is very like transforming a mental image of the written notation. (2) Listeners may handle inversions differently from the other transformations, comparing the standard and the comparison contour element by contour element, in temporal order. In this view, the temporal dimension would appear to have precedence over the pitch dimension in the musical structure, in consideration of the consequences of disturbing it.     

Tonal expectations influence pitch perception

In this study, we investigated the influence of tonal relatedness on pitch perception in melodies. Tonal expectations for target tones were manipulated in melodic contexts while controlling sensory expectations, thus allowing us to assess specifically the influence oftonal expectations on pitch perception. Three experimentsprovided converging evidence that tonal relatedness modulates pitch perception in nonmusician listeners. Experiment 1 showed, with a rating task, the influence of the tonal relatedness of a target tone on listeners' judgments of tuning/mistuning. Experiment 2 showed, with a priming task, that pitch processing of in-tune tones was faster for tonally related targets than for less related targets. Experiment 3 showed, with a comparison task, that discrimination performance for small mistunings was better when the to-be-compared tones were tonally related to the melodic context. Findings are discussed in relation to psychoacoustic research on contextual pitch perception and to studies showing facilitation of early processing steps via knowledge- and attention-related processes.     

Memory decreases for prose,but not for poetry

Memory for details of text generally declines relatively rapidly, whereas memory for propositional and context-based meanings is generally more resilient over time. In the present study, we investigated short-term memory for two kinds of verbal material: prose and poetry. Participants heard or read prose stories or poems in which aphrase near the start of the passage served as a target. The text continued, and after various delays, memory was tested with a repetition of the target (old verbatim; O), a paraphrased lure (P), or a lure in which the meaning was changed. For prose, memory for surface details (as measured by O/P discrimination) declined over time (Experiments 2-4), as was expected. For poetry, memory for surface details (O/P discrimination) did not decline with increasing delay (Experiments 1, 3, and 4). This lack of decline in memory for the surface details of poetry is discussed in relation to similar results previously observed for musical excerpts (Dowling, Tillmann, & Ayers, 2001), suggesting that a particular role is played by the temporal organization and rhythmic structure of poetry andmusic.     

The child's experience of Munchhausen syndrome by proxy

This paper examines the emotional impact of Munchhausen syndrome by proxy on a child aged 6 who had been poisoned by her mother. It describes her treatment in child psychotherapy over twenty months at the Cassel Hospital where the family worked towards her successful rehabilitation home. The work with her showed her experience of dangerous relationships in her family that left her distrustful of any new relationship, and doubtful of her capacity to be close without being destructive. Like her parents, she was terrified of facing the murderous feelings in the family, retreating into denial when life was too painful. The paper describes three phases of treatment: fear of separation and preoccupation with the trauma of poisoning, ambivalence about facing the destructiveness in the family and the move into more appropriate latency behaviour as she prepared to go home with her parents. It concludes with an overview of the impact of Munchhausen syndrome by proxy on the developing child, as shown in this treatment: the delay in emotional and cognitive development, the interference with the capacity to relate, the retreat into illness under stress, and the fear of permanent damage caused by the emotional and physical abuse.