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.     

To Challenge the Morning Lark and the Night Owl: Using Smartphone Sensing Data to Investigate Day–Night Behaviour Patterns

For decades, day–night patterns in behaviour have been investigated by asking people about their sleep–wake timing, their diurnal activity patterns, and their sleep duration. We demonstrate that the increasing digitalization of lifestyle offers new possibilities for research to investigate day–night patterns and related traits with the help of behavioural data. Using smartphone sensing, we collected in vivo data from 597 participants across several weeks and extracted behavioural day–night pattern indicators. Using this data, we explored three popular research topics. First, we focused on individual differences in day–night patterns by investigating whether ‘morning larks’ and ‘night owls’ manifest in smartphone-sensed behavioural indicators. Second, we examined whether personality traits are related to day–night patterns. Finally, exploring social jetlag, we investigated whether traits and work weekly day–night behaviours influence day–night patterns on weekends. Our findings highlight that behavioural data play an essential role in understanding daily routines and their relations to personality traits. We discuss how psychological research can integrate new behavioural approaches to study personality.     

Semantic interference in the picture-word interference task: Is there a pre-lexical,conceptual contribution to the effect?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Picture naming takes longer in the presence of a semantic-categorically related distractor word compared to an unrelated distractor word. This semantic...     

Bullying in university between peers and by personnel: cultural variation in prevalence,forms, and gender differences in four countries

Social Psychology of Education - This study reports results from cross-cultural comparisons of (a) the frequency of university students’ experiences of bullying victimization and perpetration...     

Academic competence and affect self-concepts in elementary school students: Social and dimensional comparisons

Social Psychology of Education - Academic self-concepts are important correlates and predictors of successful scholastic learning. According to the internal/external frame of reference (I/E)...     

How much self-presentation behavior do applicants from the United Arab Emirates exhibit?

Applicants from different cultures vary in their self-presentation behavior during job interviews. This study investigates self-presentation behavior in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the second largest economy in the Arab world. Specifically, it examines self-presentation behavior of applicants from the UAE and compares it to the behavior of American, European, and Chinese applicants from previous studies. The randomized response technique was used to gather self-presentation prevalence data of 111 UAE applicants regarding self-presentation behavior in their last job interview. Prevalence rates were lower than those from the United States and from China but higher than those from Iceland and from Switzerland. Results indicate that though UAE culture values modesty, UAE applicants still engage in distinct self-presentation behavior.     

Acting-out: its functions within analytic group psychotherapy and its transformation into dreams

In group processes, acting-out has diverse functions, all of them equally important. It has an intrapsychic, interpersonal, and group dynamic function. Not only may it be understood as a form of resistance, but also in its communicative and reparative potential. The authors investigate the thesis that acting-out also contains the seed for change, thus helping patients divest themselves of pathological behavior. Using a group process as an example, this article shows how boundaries can be drawn between past and present experiences while using the communicative and reparative functions of acting-out. Unconscious psychodynamics can then be transformed from acting-out into dreams.     

Locus of inhibition in the masked priming of response alternatives

Masked prime stimuli presented immediately before target stimuli in a choice reaction task give rise to behavioral costs when the primes and the target stimuli are mapped to the same response and result in benefits when they are mapped to opposite responses. Researchers assume that this negative compatibility effect reflects inhibitory processes in the control of perceptuomotor links. The authors investigated whether the inhibition operates at the level of abstract central codes or at effector-specific motor stages. In 2 experiments (N = 8 participants in each), left or right hand or foot responses were required to target stimuli that were preceded by masked arrow primes mapped to the same response side as the target stimuli in compatible trials and to the opposite response side in incompatible trials; the primes were irrelevant in neutral trials. In Experiment 1, when the masked primes determined both response side and modality, there was no transfer of negative compatibility effects across response modalities. That finding is inconsistent with a central abstract locus of inhibition and suggests that inhibition operates at effector-specific motor stages. In Experiment 2, primes conveyed only response side information but left response modality uncertain, and negative compatibility effects were elicited for both hand and foot responses, suggesting that partially informative masked primes can trigger a parallel activation and subsequent inhibition of response processes within separate effector systems.