Structural,Metabolic, and Functional Brain Abnormalities as a Result of Prenatal Exposure to Drugs of Abuse: Evidence from Neuroimaging

Prenatal exposure to alcohol and stimulants negatively affects the developing trajectory of the central nervous system in many ways. Recent advances in neuroimaging methods have allowed researchers to study the structural, metabolic, and functional abnormalities resulting from prenatal exposure to drugs of abuse in living human subjects. Here we review the neuroimaging literature of prenatal exposure to alcohol, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Neuroimaging studies of prenatal alcohol exposure have reported differences in the structure and metabolism of many brain systems, including in frontal, parietal, and temporal regions, in the cerebellum and basal ganglia, as well as in the white matter tracts that connect these brain regions. Functional imaging studies have identified significant differences in brain activation related to various cognitive domains as a result of prenatal alcohol exposure. The published literature of prenatal exposure to cocaine and methamphetamine is much smaller, but evidence is beginning to emerge suggesting that exposure to stimulant drugs in utero may be particularly toxic to dopamine-rich basal ganglia regions. Although the interpretation of such findings is somewhat limited by the problem of polysubstance abuse and by the difficulty of obtaining precise exposure histories in retrospective studies, such investigations provide important insights into the effects of drugs of abuse on the structure, function, and metabolism of the developing human brain. These insights may ultimately help clinicians develop better diagnostic tools and devise appropriate therapeutic interventions to improve the condition of children with prenatal exposure to drugs of abuse.     

Hope for the Worst: Occasional Reinforced Extinction and Expectancy Violation in the Treatment of OCD

An inhibitory learning conceptualization of treatment mechanisms in exposure-based therapy appears to better account for durability of symptom reduction and index overall learning. Presented here is an overview of two core elements of inhibitory learning, expectancy violation and occasional reinforced extinction, as they are thought to function in exposure and response prevention (ERP) for OCD. The overview is then followed by case examples illustrating these processes at work in a naturalistic clinical setting. Implications for treatment are broadly discussed.     

Altruistic behavior and the bidimensional just world belief

Thirty participants were sampled after donating charity to a street beggar and were compared by means of 2 short scales of belief in ajust world for self (BJWS) and belief in a just world for others (BJWO) with 30 randomly selected people who passed the beggar by without donating charity. We assumed that BJWO would be negatively related to altruistic behavior, whereas BJWS would be positively linked with it. A logistic regression analysis introducing BJWS, BJWO, and participants' age and gender as predictors showed that BJWO was negatively related to altruistic behavior, whereas the BJWS tended to be positively associated to it. No effects were observed for age or gender.     

AN ESSAY ON DREAMING,PSYCHICAL WORKING OUT AND WORKING THROUGH2

In this paper the author attempts to expand the idea put forward by Freud who considered dreams as a special form of unconscious thinking. It is the author's contention that the psychical working‐out function performed by dreams is a form of unconscious thinking, which transforms affects into memories and mental structures. He also attempts to clarify the way in which meaning is built and transformed in mental life. In that respect the unconscious internal world is seen as a form of unconscious thinking, a private theatre where meaning is generated and transformed. He focuses on what happens to feelings in dreams in connection with the meanings as a result of and an expression of the several stages of working through. The dream world is described as the setting where the mind gives expressive pictorial representation to the emotions involved in a conflict: a first step towards thinkability. The dreamwork also constitutes a process through which meaning is apprehended, built on and transformed at an expressive non‐discursive level, based on representation through figurative/pictorial images. The author draws on Meltzer's formulation to conjecture that the working‐through function of dreams, mainly in response to interpretations, is performed by a process of progression in formal qualities of the representations made available by dreaming in the form he has called affective pictograms. It is through progression in formal qualities of the representation that the thinking capabilities of the affective life develop and become part of the process of what is called metaphorically the metabolisation of emotional life. This process takes place through migration of meaning across various levels of mental process. In this perspective the analyst'sinterpretations of dreams effect what linguists call transmutation of the symbolic basis, a process that is necessary to help the mind to improve its capacity to think. Something expressed on the evocative plane and condensed into a pictographic image is then transformed into verbal language that expresses meaning. These conceptions are illustrated by a detailed clinical case.     

VIDEO MODELING TO TRAIN STAFF TO IMPLEMENT DISCRETE‐TRIAL INSTRUCTION

Three new direct‐service staff participated in a program that used a video model to train target skills needed to conduct a discrete‐trial session. Percentage accuracy in completing a discrete‐trial teaching session was evaluated using a multiple baseline design across participants. During baseline, performances ranged from a mean of 12% to 63% accuracy. During video modeling, there was an immediate increase in accuracy to a mean of 98%, 85%, and 94% for each participant. Performance during maintenance and generalization probes remained at high levels. Results suggest that video modeling can be an effective technique to train staff to conduct discrete‐trial sessions.     

The dynamic infrastructure of mind—A hypothesis and some of its applications

A mechanism underlying the computational properties of the cognitive architecture is construed based on a minimal list of operational clusters. This general processing mechanism constitutes the dynamic infrastructure of mind (DIM). DIM consists in categories of mental operations foundational for learning that contain inborn components called inner operations, which are self-developing in the interaction mind-environment. Within the DIM paradigm, the input cognitive systems are not domain specific or core-knowledge specific, they are operational specific and capable of further developments that become domain specific while experiencing the environment. Arguments for this construal come from three sources: literature review, data collected through classroom observations, and a four-year experimental study of teaching and learning mathematics in primary grades. The outcomes of that experiment led to a methodology of learning based on activating the operational infrastructure of mind, which enhances students' flexibility of thinking and predicts the capacity to solve creatively a variety of problems.