Recording supervision: Educational,therapeutic, and enhances the supervisory working alliance?

Aims: To explore the impact of listening to an audio‐recording of their latest supervision session on supervisees. Method: Participants recorded a supervision session, listened to it and were interviewed about this experience of listening to it within seven days of listening to the recording. The phenomenological interviews informed by the researcher's knowledge were analysed using grounded theory. Participants: Fifteen participants with 0–20 years’ experience, representing person‐centred, CBT, psychodynamic and integrative approaches, and qualifications ranging from student to doctorate formed the theoretical sample. Findings: Listening to the audio‐recording allowed participants to re‐experience their thoughts and emotions. Participants recalled and re‐experienced events which had been forgotten, unnoticed or (arguably) repressed. This re‐experiencing was usually less emotive than in real‐time; but suppressed emotions could be more intense. As participants integrated both these noticed and unnoticed events, they were able to accept what had been unacceptable, gaining self‐awareness, which was potentially therapeutic. Noticing what had been unnoticed permitted insights into many aspects of therapy and supervision, which was more than just ‘reflection‐on‐action’. Conclusion: Listening to an audio‐recording of the latest supervision may be educational for any supervisee; it may be therapeutic by facilitating challenge of maladaptive beliefs and behaviours; and it also seems to strengthen the supervisory working alliance.     

Virtually True: Children's Acquisition of False Memories in Virtual Reality

Previous work on human memory has shown that prompting participants with false events and self-relevant information via different types of media such as narratives, edited 2-dimensional images, and mental imagery creates false memories. This study tested a new form of media for studying false memory formation: Immersive Virtual Environment Technology (IVET). Using this tool, we examined how memory was affected by viewing dynamic simulations of avatars performing novel actions. In the study, 55 preschool and elementary children were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 memory prompt conditions (idle, mental imagery, IVET simulation of another child, or IVET simulation of self). Each child was questioned 3 different times: once before the memory prompt, once immediately after the memory prompt, and once approximately 5 days after the memory prompt. Results showed that preschool children were equally likely to develop false memories regardless of memory prompt condition. But, for elementary children, the mental imagery and IVET self conditions caused significantly more false memories than the idle condition. Implications regarding the use of digital media in courtroom settings, clinical therapy settings, entertainment, and other applications are discussed.     

Disgust sensitivity and fear of animals: Effect of exposure to violent or revulsive material

Subjects were asked to rate their fear of four categories of animals both before and after viewing one of three brief video films. Subjects watched either (a) a video depicting extreme violence, (b) a video depicting revulsive scenes from a hospital operation, or (c) a video showing neutral landscape scenes. The results suggested that exposure to violent material produced an increase in fear ratings for animals in the Hi Fear/Hi Predatory category (e.g., lion, tiger, shark) which was significantly different from a decrease in fear ratings recorded for all other categories of animals. However, exposure to revulsive material produced an increase in fear ratings to animals in both the Hi Fear/Lo Predatory category (e.g., rat, spider, snake) and the Hi Revulsion category (e.g., slug, maggot, snail) which was significantly different to the decrease in fear ratings recorded for animals in the remaining categories. The neutral landscape scenes produced a decrease in mean fear ratings for all categories of animals. These results are considered further support for a disease-avoidance model of common animal fears, and suggest a causal link between disgust sensitivity and fear of certain fear-relevant animals.     

Characteristics of individuals with fear of spiders

Abstract

This paper reports the results of two studies which investigated some of the factors that differentiated individuals with fear of spiders from those without such fears. The main results suggested that (a) there was little evidence that fear of spiders in nonclinical subjects is normally acquired through direct conditioning experiences; (b) there was some evidence for a familial component to spider fears; (c) there was no support for the view that individuals reporting a fear of spiders were especially sensitized to the movement cues possessed by spiders; (d) fear of spiders was not associated either with higher levels of trait anxiety or with an increased predisposition to other fears in general; but (e) fear of spiders did appear to be associated with increased fear of other animals, but only animals that are normally considered fear-evoking or disgust-evoking. These results provide little support for a traditional conditioning view of spider fears, and they are not entirely consistent with some preparedness accounts of the acquisition of specific fears. However, the results do suggest that fear of spiders is part of a functionally integrated set of animal fears, and it is argued that the present results could be better understood by attempting to integrate predator-defence and disease-avoidance models of animal fears.     

Insight into the Parenthood Paradox: Mental Health Outcomes of Intensive Mothering

Though people often report wanting to have children because they think it will make them happier, much research suggests that parenting is associated with decreased well-being. Other studies have found that parenting is related to increased life satisfaction. The goal of this study was to provide insight into this paradox by investigating the relationship between a specific way of parenting, intensive parenting, and maternal mental health. An online survey was completed by 181 mothers with children ages 5 and under. Intensive mothering beliefs correlated with several negative mental health outcomes. Controlling for perceived family social support, the belief that women are the essential parent was related to lower life satisfaction and believing that parenting is challenging was related to greater depression and stress. The results of this study suggest that aspects of intensive mothering beliefs are detrimental to women’s mental health. It may not be parenting per se, but specific and particularly intensive ways of parenting, that relate to negative mental health outcomes.     

The development of stranger fear in infancy and toddlerhood: normative development,individual differences,antecedents, and outcomes

Despite implications that stranger fear is an important aspect of developing behavioral inhibition, a known risk factor for anxiety, normative and atypical developmental trajectories of stranger fear across infancy and toddlerhood remain understudied. We used a large, longitudinal data set (N = 1285) including multi‐trait, multi‐method assessments of temperament to examine the normative course of development for stranger fear and to explore the possibility that individual differences exist in trajectories of stranger fear development between 6 and 36 months of age. A latent class growth analysis suggested four different trajectories of stranger fear during this period. Stable, high levels of stranger fear over time were associated with poorer RSA suppression at 6 months of age. Rates of concordance in trajectory‐based class membership for identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins, along with associations between atypical stranger fear development and greater anxiety‐related maternal characteristics, suggested that individual differences in developmental trajectories of stranger fear may be heritable. Importantly, trajectories of stranger fear during infancy and toddlerhood were linked to individual differences in behavioral inhibition, with chronically high levels of stranger fear and sharp increases in stranger fear over time related to greater levels of inhibition than other developmental trajectories.     

The spiritual care of sick children: reflections from a pilot participation project

The authors are a multi-disciplinary team of chaplains, one with a counselling qualification, and an academic with a research background in spirituality and youth work. A pilot participation project undertaken at Birmingham Children’s Hospital (UK) focused on increasing the understanding of the spiritual needs of sick children and young people and involving children and young people in improving the service and provision of spiritual and religious care to them. Views from children, young people and parents were sought with the intention of developing resources and training that help facilitate the meeting of spiritual and religious needs of children and young people in hospital. Within the wider chaplaincy team are chaplains from the six major world faiths and this project considers spiritual needs of children and young people who perceive themselves as belonging to a faith group or not. Reflections from the pilot include identifying ten principles and practices to inform the spiritual care of sick children and proposing the concept of interpretive spiritual encounters as a tool for spiritual care. The pilot study indicated that being more proactive in offering spiritual care enhanced the quality of service offered by Chaplaincy.     

Modulation sensitivity in the perceptual organization of speech

In a spoken utterance, a talker expresses linguistic constituents in serial order. A listener resolves these linguistic properties in the rapidly fading auditory sample. Classic measures agree that auditory integration occurs at a fine temporal grain. In contrast, recent studies have proposed that sensory integration of speech occurs at a coarser grain, approximate to the syllable, on the basis of indirect and relatively insensitive perceptual measures. Evidence from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral primatology has also been adduced to support the claim of sensory integration at the pace of syllables. In the present investigation, we used direct performance measures of integration, applying an acoustic technique to isolate the contribution of short-term acoustic properties to the assay of modulation sensitivity. In corroborating the classic finding of a fine temporal grain of integration, these functional measures can inform theory and speculation in accounts of speech perception.     

Invited Address at the Occasion of the Bertelson Award 2005 Impairments in visual discrimination in amnesia: Implications for theories of the role of medial temporal lobe regions in human memory

A prominent and long-standing view of human long-term memory is that structures within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) work together to support the acquisition of memory for facts and events. In contrast to this view, recent studies in rats and non-human primates suggest dissociations in function between regions comprising the MTL. Evidence in support of such specialisation in humans, however, has been inconclusive, leading some researchers to propose that human MTL functions as a unitary system uniquely specialised for the acquisition and storage of long-term memory. This paper reviews some of the key studies from the animal and human literature that support an account of functional differentiation and discusses the different theoretical positions that have emerged from their findings. A series of recent experiments in humans designed to determine whether there is functional homogeneity in MTL regions across species are also reviewed and an alternative account of human memory—in which long-term memory is dependent upon representations distributed throughout the human brain rather than one specialised system—is proposed.