Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Co-occurring Depression and Chronic Pain

Up to 37% of individuals experience chronic pain during their lifetimes. Approximately one-fourth of primary care patients with chronic pain also meet criteria for major depression. Many of these individuals fail to receive psychotherapy or other treatment for their depression; moreover when they do, physical pain is often not addressed directly. Women, socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals, African Americans and Latinos all report higher rates of pain and depression compared to other groups. This article describes a version of Interpersonal Psychotherapy tailored for patients with comorbid depression and chronic pain, Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depression and Pain (IPT-P). While IPT-P potentially could be delivered to many different patient populations in a range of clinical settings, this article focuses on its delivery within primary care settings for socioeconomically disadvantaged women. Adaptations include a brief 8-session protocol that incorporates strategies for anticipating barriers to psychotherapy, accepting patients' conceptualization of their difficulties, encouraging patients to consider the impact of their pain on their roles and relationships, emphasizing self-care, incorporating pain management techniques, and flexible scheduling. In addition, IPT-P is designed as an adjunct to usual medical pain treatment, and seeks to engage non-treatment seeking patients in psychotherapy by focusing on accessibility and relevance of the intervention to concerns common among patients with pain. Identifying patients with comorbid depression and chronic pain and offering IPT-P as a treatment option has the potential to improve clinical outcomes for individuals with depression and chronic pain.     

Attitudes of Genetic Counselors Towards Genetic Susceptibility Testing in Children

Genetic susceptibility research and testing is leading to an era of personalized medicine. Genetic counselors act as liaisons between the medical genetics community and the public. Understanding the opinions of genetic counselors will be important in developing testing guidelines. Attitudes towards genetic susceptibility testing in children were assessed for 216 NSGC members. Genetic counselors were likely to support testing if the results would determine: disease progression or prognosis, likelihood of survival after a specific treatment, or risk for an adverse drug reaction. Genetic counselors were unlikely to support testing to determine susceptibility to later disease development or in the absence of available intervention. There was a strong positive correlation between attitudes associated with desire to test their own child, if at risk and their support for genetic testing in any child at risk. Respondents strongly favored parent/guardian and child’s rights over doctor or insurance rights. They indicated assent should be obtained prior to testing, when appropriate, and that a copy of results should be kept in a permanent medical record. Respondents expressed concerns about insurance discrimination, testing in the absence of medical necessity, and taking away a child’s autonomy.     

Effect of language proficiency and executive control on verbal fluency performance in bilinguals

We use a time-course analysis to examine the roles of vocabulary size and executive control in bilinguals’ verbal fluency performance. Two groups of bilinguals and a group of monolingual adults were tested in English with verbal fluency subtests from the Delis–Kaplan Executive Function System. The two bilingual groups were equivalent in their self-rated English proficiency but differed in levels of receptive and expressive vocabulary. We hypothesized that the difference between the two bilingual groups in vocabulary and between the monolingual and bilingual groups in executive control would lead to differences in performance on the category and letter fluency tests and dissociate the roles of vocabulary knowledge and executive control in verbal production. Bilinguals and monolinguals performed equivalently in category fluency, but the high-vocabulary bilingual group outperformed both monolinguals and low-vocabulary bilinguals in letter fluency. An analysis of the retrieval time-course functions in letter fluency showed dissociable effects of resources available at the initiation of the trial, considered to reflect vocabulary size, and ability to monitor and retrieve new items using a novel phonemic-based word searching strategy, considered to reflect executive control. The difference in slope of the best-fitting curves reflected enhanced executive control for both bilingual groups compared to monolinguals, whereas the difference in the starting point of the logarithmic functions reflected higher levels of vocabulary for high-vocabulary bilinguals and monolinguals compared to low-vocabulary bilinguals. The results are discussed in terms of the contributions of linguistic resources and executive control to verbal performance.     

Suturing the Body Corporate (Divine and Human) in the Brahmanic Traditions

In this discussion, we ponder the discourse about the ‘body of the Divine’ in the Indian tradition. Beginning with the Vedas, we survey the major eras and thinkers of that tradition, considering various notions of the Supreme Divine Being it produced. For each, we ask: is the Divine embodied? If so, then in what way? What is the nature of the body of the Divine, and what is its relationship to human bodies? What is the value of the body of the Divine to the spiritual aspirant? We consider, where relevant, which views are pantheistic and which might be considered panentheistic. Panentheism is connected with discourse on the world as the body of God. It has origins in medieval Christian theology with anticipatory traces in Plato’s Timeaus. Under pantheism, were the world to end—were it to collapse or disappear irreversibly, perhaps, into a huge black hole—then God would disintegrate without a remainder as well; for in this view the Divine Spirit is the universe. The same is not true under panentheism which posits a more complex relationship between the Divine and the world. According to panentheism, God pervades the world—God is in the world—and at the same time, God sustains the world—the world is in God. This allows that God be greater than, transcendent of and independent of the world. In our conclusion we remark on how the views we have surveyed link to, resonate with, or dis-compare with the current—should one say revivified—interest in intellectual quarters with panentheism.     

Fostering collaborative mind-sets among customers: a transformative learning approach

To succeed and grow, companies must win new customers. However, selling innovative solutions to prospective business customers remains challenging. We seek to explore how salespeople create, early in the sales process, collaborative customer mind-sets to accommodate learning and adoption of new solutions. By applying transformative learning theory and analyzing authentic video-recorded business-to-business (B2B) initial sales meetings, we are able to determine the microlevel processes and mechanisms taking place in transformative sales dialogue. In this article, we outline seven interactional activities occurring in reflective dialogue cycles, a key means by which salespeople create new customer mind-sets. Reflective dialogue cycles form a spiral-shaped process requiring completion to achieve a shared new understanding favorable to adopting new approaches. Through our analysis, we demonstrate the value of transformative learning theory in better understanding sales interactions. Along with theoretical contributions, our results may help managers and salespeople better develop new business customers.     

Online mentoring and computer-mediated communication: New directions in research

While there has been a veritable explosion of online mentoring websites and opportunities within a wide variety of professions, very few academic articles to date have addressed this phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to remedy this gap in our knowledge by: (a) suggesting that the Internet can provide a viable context for mentoring within defined roles, (b) presenting a new typology of mentoring based on the computer-mediated-communication (CMC) literature, and in doing so suggest new opportunities and challenges, and (c) providing recommendations for researchers and practitioners to explore online mentoring. Past research has found that within the three functions of mentoring (psychosocial, vocational, and role modeling), a mentor can play a number of roles such as business coach, friend, counselor, and/or teacher to a protégé. We extend past research by assessing the major issues applicable to these mentor roles through an examination of CMC literature. We provide specific research propositions to inspire future research into online mentoring and its related contexts, roles, opportunities, and challenges.     

Problems of Operationalizing Habits and Integrating Habits in Normative Decision‐Making Models1

This paper reports on a study, conducted in Bochum, Germany, involving 160 participants. Two research interests were combined in our study. The first aim was to integrate habit into the process of normative decision making to predict environmentally relevant behavior. Two approaches of implementing habits are analyzed and discussed. Both conceptualizing habitual and normative influences on behavior as excluding paths and integrating habit into the process of normative decision making are illustrated by data. With our approach, we intended to initialize a discussion about the consideration of habits in the context of normative decisions. The second aim was to develop and test different modifications of Verplanken's (Verplanken, Aarts, van Knippenberg, & van Knippenberg, 1994) response frequency measure (RFM) to improve the operational ization of habit. The modified forms of RFM were not more appropriate than the unmodified form. Therefore, we suggest using the unmodified RFM until there is an improved form available.     

Applying Social Cognitive Career Theory to the Empowerment of Battered Women

Despite increasing attention to the problem of domestic violence and its multifaceted consequences, the career development needs of battered women have only sporadically been addressed in the vocational psychology literature. In this article, the scope and consequences of domestic violence are reviewed, highlighting effects on women's career and educational well‐being. Social cognitive career theory (SCCT; R. W. Lent, S. D. Brown, & G. Hackett, 1994) is described and applied to the experiences of women living in domestic violence situations. A framework for empowering battered women and using SCCT to promote their career development and attainment is provided, along with recommendations for future research.     

The impact of bilingual environments on selective attention in infancy

Bilingualism has been observed to influence cognitive processing across the lifespan but whether bilingual environments have an effect on selective attention and attention strategies in infancy remains an unresolved question. In Study 1, infants exposed to monolingual or bilingual environments participated in an eye‐tracking cueing task in which they saw centrally presented stimuli followed by a target appearing on either the left or right side of the screen. Halfway through the trials, the central stimuli reliably predicted targets' locations. In Study 2, the first half of the trials consisted of centrally presented cues that predicted targets' locations; in the second half, the cue–target location relation switched. All infants performed similarly in Study 1, but in Study 2 infants raised in bilingual, but not monolingual, environments were able to successfully update their expectations by making more correct anticipatory eye movements to the target and expressing faster reactive eye latencies toward the target in the post‐switch condition. The experience of attending to a complex environment in which infants simultaneously process and contrast two languages may account for why infants raised in bilingual environments have greater attentional control than those raised in monolingual environments.