A hermeneutic study of integrating psychotherapist competence in postnatal Child Health Care: Parents’ perspectives

A child's emotional and social development depends on the parents’ provision of optimal support. Many parents with perinatal distress experience difficulties in mastering parenthood and seek help from professionals within primary healthcare. A clinical project was launched in Stockholm, where psychodynamic psychotherapists provided short-term consultations at Child Health Centers. This study qualitatively explored parents’ experiences of perinatal distress and of receiving help by nurses and therapists in the project. Thirteen parents were interviewed, and their responses were analyzed with a hermeneutical method. Three main themes crystallized; accessibility of psychological help and detection of emotional problems; experiences of therapy at the Child Health Center; and the therapists’ technique. Parents were also clustered into three so-called ideal types: the insecure; parents in crisis; and parents with lifelong psychological problems. Parents experienced obstacles in accessing psychological care within primary healthcare. Psychotherapists with a holistic family perspective and who managed to oscillate between insight-promoting and supportive interventions were especially appreciated. Patient categories who benefitted from insight promotion and support, respectively, were identified.     

Mother still knows best: Maternal influence uniquely modulates adolescent reward sensitivity during risk taking

Adolescent decision‐making is highly sensitive to input from the social environment. In particular, adult and maternal presence influence adolescents to make safer decisions when encountered with risky scenarios. However, it is currently unknown whether maternal presence confers a greater advantage than mere adult presence in buffering adolescent risk taking. In the current study, 23 adolescents completed a risk‐taking task during an fMRI scan in the presence of their mother and an unknown adult. Results reveal that maternal presence elicits greater activation in reward‐related neural circuits when making safe decisions but decreased activation following risky choices. Moreover, adolescents evidenced a more immature neural phenotype when making risky choices in the presence of an adult compared to mother, as evidenced by positive functional coupling between the ventral striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Our results underscore the importance of maternal stimuli in bolstering adolescent decision‐making in risky scenarios.     

Examining direct and indirect pathways to health behaviour: The influence of cognitive and affective probability beliefs

This study aimed to extricate the influence of rational (e.g. ‘I think …’) and intuitive (e.g. ‘I feel …’) probability beliefs in the behavioural decision-making process regarding skin cancer prevention practices. Structural equation modelling was used in two longitudinal surveys (sun protection during winter sports [N?=?491]; sun protection during summer [N?=?277]) to examine direct and indirect behavioural effects of affective and cognitive likelihood (i.e. unmediated or mediated by intention), controlled for attitude, social influence and self-efficacy. Affective likelihood was directly related to sun protection in both studies, whereas no direct effects were found for cognitive likelihood. After accounting for past sun protective behaviour, affective likelihood was only directly related to sun protection in Study 1. No support was found for the indirect effects of affective and cognitive likelihood through intention. The findings underscore the importance of feelings of (cancer) risk in the decision-making process and should be acknowledged by health behaviour theories and risk communication practices. Suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Capturing the Structure of Distinct Types of Individual Differences in the Situation‐specific Experience of Emotions: The Case of Anger

The aim of this paper was to understand why some people experience certain emotions in a specific situation, whereas others do not. We postulate that these individual differences arise from individual differences in two underlying processes of emotion elicitation: (i) individual differences in the emotion components (appraisals and action tendencies) that situations activate in a person and (ii) individual differences in how these emotion components are related to subjective emotional experience. In this paper, we re‐analysed data from two studies on anger to capture the structure of these two types of individual differences by using clustering modelling techniques. Consistent results across the two studies demonstrated that individuals differ in anger because they (i) differ in how easy they experience anger‐relevant appraisals (Studies 1 and 2) and action tendencies (Study 2) in increasingly negative situations and (ii) differ in which of these components are necessary to experience anger. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paw preference is not affected by postural demand in a nonprimate mammal (Felis silvestris catus)

Previously, it has been thought that handedness is unique to humans. Recently, it has been found that hand or paw preferences are common among a variety of vertebrate species. Different models have been put forth to describe the evolution of primate handedness. In this study we aimed to explore whether these models can also be used to predict manual laterality in nonprimate mammalian groups. The cat (Felis silvestris catus) is a good nonprimate model for manual laterality, as cats frequently use paws to catch and hold prey. Cats were exposed to two standardized manual laterality tasks, differing in postural demand. Subjects (N = 28) were forced to use either a stable or unstable body posture (i.e., sitting or standing vs. vertical clinging) to extract food items from a plastic box attached at two different heights. We revealed that cats exhibited paw preferences at an individual level with about 40% left, 30% right, 30% nonlateralized subjects. Postural demand was linked to task difficulty: the unstable body posture was found to be significantly more difficult than the stable body posture. However, these differences in postural demand and task difficulty did not lead to differences in direction or strength of paw preference. Findings suggested that nonprimate mammals differ from primates in their sensitivity to task related factors, such as postural demand. Results coincide with those of some prosimians, providing support for the hypothesis that postural demand and the associated task complexity became influencing factors on manual laterality in the course of primate evolution.     

Individual and relational contributions to parallel and joint attention in infancy

Objective

This study examined the contributions of maternal bids for joint attention, relationship quality, and infant characteristics, to individual differences in infants’ parallel and joint attention.

Method

Fifty-two 10-month-olds and their mothers were assessed in order to investigate concurrent predictors of infant parallel attention, responding to joint attention, and initiating joint attention.

Results

Parallel attention was predicted by infants’ higher mental development, low expression of negative emotionality, and maternal entertaining behaviors. Responding to joint attention was marginally predicted by total maternal bids for joint attention. Initiating joint attention was predicted by the infants’ low expression of negative emotionality, as well as marginally predicted by fewer maternal teaching behaviors.

Conclusion

These results further the understanding of the factors influencing infant parallel as well as joint attention.     

Empathy or Intersubjectivity? Understanding the Origins of Morality in Young Children’

This article is about young children’s morality and their concern for others’ wellbeing. Questions of what the value of others’ wellbeing can signify, how this value becomes visible to children and how it is expressed in their interaction will be posed. In this analysis, children’s commitment to others’ wellbeing is discussed in terms of two theories, namely the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 1964) theory of intersubjectivity and the psychologist Martin Hoffman’s (1984, 1987, 2000) theory of empathy. The interaction between children and adults in pre-school, drawn from different studies of morality (Johansson, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003), constitutes the empirical basis. In the discussion, it is claimed that children’s care for others’ wellbeing can be understood in a fruitful way as experiences of, approaches to and ways of being involved in the other’s life-world rather than as expressions of empathy.

Evaluation of the Responding in Peaceful and Positive Ways (RIPP) Seventh Grade Violence Prevention Curriculum

We evaluated the impact of RIPP-7, a seventh grade violence prevention curriculum designed to strengthen and extend the effects of the sixth grade RIPP-6 curriculum. Classes of seventh graders at two urban middle schools serving predominantly African-American youth where RIPP-6 had been implemented the preceding school year were randomized to intervention (N = 239) and control groups (N = 237). Compared to students in the control group, students who participated in RIPP-7 had fewer disciplinary code violations for violent offenses during the following school year. A limited number of main effects were found on self-report outcome measures and measures of attitudes. Although significant main effects were not found on self-report measures of physical aggression, drug use, or anxiety, analyses of interactions with pretest scores indicated that intervention effects were significantly moderated by pretest scores for several outcome measures. Students most likely to benefit from the intervention were those who reported higher pretest rates of problem behaviors including violent behavior, nonphysical aggression, and delinquent behavior.     

Personality development and growth in women across 30 years: three perspectives

This article addressesthree questions about personality development in a 30‐year longitudinal study of women (N = 78): (1) To what extent did the women maintain the same position inrelation to each other on personality characteristics over the 30 years, and what broad factorswere related to the amount of change in their rank order? (2) Did the sample as a whole increaseor decrease over time on indices of personality growth, and did they change in ways distinctive towomen? (3) Were experiential factors associated with individual differences in the amount ofchange? Results showed that personality was quite consistent while also showing that timeinterval was positively related to rank‐order change and age was negatively related to rank‐orderchange. Over the period from age 21 to age 52, the women increased on measures ofnorm‐orientation and complexity and showed changes on measures of Dominance andFemininity/Masculinity consistent with the hypothesis that changing sex roles would lead toincreases in Dominance and increases, then decreases, in Femininity/Masculinity. A third set ofresults showed that changes in Dominance and Femininity/Masculinity were associated with lifecircumstances such as marital tension, divorce, and participation in the paid labor force. Theimplications of the findings for personality development and growth are discussed.     

Ego development and the ethics of care and justice: the relations among them revisited

This study examined the links among ego development and the ethics of care and justice in 144 Norwegian men and women, 15 to 48 years old, taking into consideration age, sex, education, and verbal intelligence. As expected, the relationship between Loevinger's model of ego development and care-based moral reasoning as measured with Skoe's Ethic of Care Interview (ECI) was significantly stronger than the one between ego development and justice as measured with Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT). Both ethics correlated significantly with verbal ability. Analyses showed that beyond its overlap with verbal intelligence, the variance shared between the ECI and ego development was substantial. By contrast, when verbal intelligence was controlled, the DIT was not significantly related to ego development or to the care ethic.