Morality and the practice of psychotherapy

The morality of psychotherapy is challenged in terms of its effects on patients, their families, and the community. This paper discusses the issue of moral neutrality in therapy, the distinction between real and neurotic guilt, and offers suggestions as to how moral discourse might be incorporated in therapy.     

Challenges to the Career Development of Urban Racial and Ethnic Minority Youth: Implications for Vocational Intervention

Urban racial and ethnic minority youth experience a variety of internal and external challenges to their career development. This article discusses several potential barriers to successful career attainment experienced by racial and ethnic minority youth and identifies a series of recommendations that vocational counselors may wish to consider in addressing the career development needs of this population.     

A Career Assistance Program for Elite Athletes

A program to assist elite athletes in coping with the transition out of active sport competition is presented. A life span development framework is used to describe the formulation of the program. An outline of the program is presented, and implications for counselors are discussed.     

Relationships among accumulated lifetime life events,prosocial skills,and behavior problems in elementary school children

Relationships among life events, prosocial skills, and behavior problems for 91 first through fourth grade children were examined. The data were based on mothers' reports of their children's lifetime life events, current prosocial skills, and current behavior problems. Higher prosocial skills scores significantly predicted lower Externalizing behavior problem scores. Higher weighted life events scores significantly predicted higher Internalizing behavior problem scores. The weighted life event scores×prosocial skills scores interaction did not significantly predict either Externalizing or Internalizing behavior problem scores. The more parsimonious main effects conceptualization suggests that life events and prosocial skills are orthogonal in young, elementary school children.     

MMPI-2 profiles of women at risk for child abuse

This study addresses the utility of the MMPI-2 in assessing personality characteristics of women who have a high potential for abusing their children. A sample of 154 women was identified on the basis of demographic characteristics as high risk for child abuse and other care-taking problems. They were evaluated (with the MMPI-2-AX form) during their pregnancy and are being followed up as part of the evaluation of a prevention/intervention program. This preliminary study compares the MMPI-2 personality characteristics of 146 of these women with several control samples: 1,462 women from the MMPI restandardization sample, 466 low education women from the restandardization sample, 84 pregnant women from the restandardization sample, and 167 women military recruits who are about the same age as the experimental group. The results show that, on the MMPI-2 clinical scales, women from the high-risk sample closely resemble child-abusing parents described in the previous MMPI literature. Moreover, these women differed significantly from all of the comparison groups on a number of MMPI-2 clinical and content scales. The clinical implications of these differences are discussed.     

Age-related differences in the involvement of the prefrontal cortex in attentional control

We investigated the relative involvement of cortical regions supporting attentional control in older and younger adults during performance on a modified version of the Stroop task. Participants were exposed to two different types of incongruent trials. One of these, an incongruent-ineligible condition, produces conflict at the non-response level, while the second, an incongruent-eligible condition, produces conflict at both non-response and response levels of information processing. Greater attentional control is needed to perform the incongruent-eligible condition compared to other conditions. We examined the cortical recruitment associated with this task in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm in 25 older and 25 younger adults. Our results indicated that while younger adults demonstrated an increase in the activation of cortical regions responsible for maintaining attentional control in response to increased levels of conflict, such sensitivity and flexibility of the cortical regions to increased attentional control demands was absent in older adults. These results suggest a limitation in older adults’ capabilities for flexibly recruiting the attentional network in response to increasing attentional demands.     

Interpersonal and emotional processes in generalized anxiety disorder analogues during social interaction tasks

Persons with chronic worry and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) report maladaptive social cognitions, interpersonal behaviors, and emotional regulation. Because research has neither investigated these processes in actual social situations nor explored whether they take heterogeneous forms, the present study provides the first attempt to do so in a laboratory investigation. GAD analogue participants and nonanxious controls interacted with confederates in an unstructured collaborative story construction task and an emotional disclosure task with standardized confederate behavior. In both tasks, relative to controls, some GAD analogues highly overestimated, whereas others markedly underestimated, their negative (Hostile-Submissive) interpersonal impact on confederates. Although GAD analogues, as a group, exhibited greater sad affect during disclosures than controls, their openness during disclosures and liking by confederates varied with their level of misestimation of negative interpersonal impact. Results underscore the need to further explore interpersonal processes in chronic worriers and how they may exacerbate or maintain dysfunction.     

Capitalizing on cortical plasticity: influence of physical activity on cognition and brain function

Given the aging populations in many countries throughout the world, there is an increasing interest in lifestyle factors and interventions that will enhance the cognitive vitality of older adults and reduce the risk for age-related neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. In this review, we evaluate the hypothesis that physical activity and exercise might serve to protect, and also enhance, cognitive and brain function across the adult lifespan. To this end, we critically review three separate literatures that have examined the influence of physical activity and exercise on cognition, brain function and brain structure of adults, including epidemiological or prospective observational studies, randomized human clinical interventions and non-human animal studies. We suggest that this literature supports the claim that physical activity enhances cognitive and brain function, and protects against the development of neurodegenerative diseases. We discuss future directions to address currently unresolved questions, such as interactions between multiple lifestyle factors on offsetting or protecting against cognitive and neural decline, and conclude that physical activity is an inexpensive treatment that could have substantial preventative and restorative properties for cognitive and brain function.     

Investigation of ethnic differences in body image between Hispanic/biethnic-Hispanic and non-Hispanic White preadolescent girls

The extent to which the construct of body image is measurement invariant across ethnic groups is an important consideration for studies examining ethnic differences and characteristics that influence body image disturbances. However, the literature examining the body image construct as a function of ethnic group membership is limited. The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether Hispanic/biethnic-Hispanic and non-Hispanic White preadolescent girls (aged 8 through 12 years old; N = 141) had fundamentally different conceptualizations of body image in a low to low/middle socioeconomic status school-based sample. Our findings suggest that the measurement construct of body image was similar and relatively stable for Hispanic/biethnic-Hispanic and non-Hispanic White preadolescent girls. In addition, the body image construct was predictably related to disordered eating symptoms in both groups, with different dimensions of body image differentially predictive by ethnic group. Overall, body image appears to be a meaningful construct with similar measurement meanings across Hispanic/biethnic-Hispanic and non-Hispanic White ethnic groups.     

How do rhesus monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Macaca mulatta</Emphasis>) scan faces in a visual paired comparison task?

When novel and familiar faces are viewed simultaneously, humans and monkeys show a preference for looking at the novel face. The facial features attended to in familiar and novel faces, were determined by analyzing the visual exploration patterns, or scanpaths, of four monkeys performing a visual paired comparison task. In this task, the viewer was first familiarized with an image and then it was presented simultaneously with a novel and the familiar image. A looking preference for the novel image indicated that the viewer recognized the familiar image and hence differentiates between the familiar and the novel images. Scanpaths and relative looking preference were compared for four types of images: (1) familiar and novel objects, (2) familiar and novel monkey faces with neutral expressions, (3) familiar and novel inverted monkey faces, and (4) faces from the same monkey with different facial expressions. Looking time was significantly longer for the novel face, whether it was neutral, expressing an emotion, or inverted. Monkeys did not show a preference, or an aversion, for looking at aggressive or affiliative facial expressions. The analysis of scanpaths indicated that the eyes were the most explored facial feature in all faces. When faces expressed emotions such as a fear grimace, then monkeys scanned features of the face, which contributed to the uniqueness of the expression. Inverted facial images were scanned similarly to upright images. Precise measurement of eye movements during the visual paired comparison task, allowed a novel and more quantitative assessment of the perceptual processes involved the spontaneous visual exploration of faces and facial expressions. These studies indicate that non-human primates carry out the visual analysis of complex images such as faces in a characteristic and quantifiable manner.