Stroop effects for masked threat words: Pre‐attentive bias or selective awareness?

The single‐trial emotional Stroop effect for masked threat words, and its association with anxiety, anger, and depression was studied in a group of men (n = 24) and women (n = 24) while controlling for possible differential thresholds for threat words versus neutral words. Stroop interference for masked threat words was found to correlate with trait anxiety, and the effect could not be explained by any differences in thresholds due to valence, neither at a subjective (conscious identification task) nor at an objective (lexical decision task) level of awareness. Jacoby's exclusion task was explored as an alternative measure of conscious awareness, and the results corroborated the conclusion that the Stroop effect for masked threat words was the result of preattentive processes. Unexpectedly, however, the correlation between Stroop interference for masked threat words and trait anxiety was found only among the men.     

Defensive patterns in reflective group supervisions at Child Health Centres

Reflective group supervision with infant healthcare workers has been described in several publications. It aims to enhance their ability to help distressed families, and to comprehend and relieve themselves of the distress that they encounter in such work. The ultimate aim has been formulated as an effort at increasing the professional's reflective function. The present article adds to the literature by applying an ego-psychological perspective on the group process and investigating defensive patterns in such supervisions. This approach includes a critical discussion of the place of the reflective function concept in psychoanalytic metapsychology. The article also suggests a Bionian perspective to account for skewed communicative patterns in groups, so-called basic assumptions. Some technical recommendations are provided on the frame in group supervision. They aim to disarm such defenses and facilitate the group participants’ possibilities of understanding and thus helping their colleague's problematic relationship with the family. To illustrate the discussion, and to help readers form an image of the supervision process, brief detailed accounts of such work are submitted.     

The Sporting Exploration of the World; Toward a Fundamental Ontology of the Sporting Human Being

ABSTRACT

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born to move. Furthermore, the homo movens is the homo ludens – an active and playful being that explores the world in different ways and in a variety of environments. The ludic exploration of the world starts with children’s play and goes all the way up to full-blown versions of rule-based sports, then on to various physical activities into old age. My point of departure is Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world which suggests that humans are never isolated individuals but are always in a deep way connected with a ‘world’. The ‘world’ of sport comes in different versions. By use of a phenomenological approach I try to show that the sporting exploration of the world takes place in four ontologically different dimensions or ‘worlds’. Here I distinguish between individual sports, encounter sports, team sports and nature sports, and I argue that the I-Me, I-You, I-Society and I-Nature relations that are exemplified in these four types of sports have different ontological characteristics. While the discussion is inspired by Heidegger’s ideas I argue that the ways of ‘worldmaking’ in sport are more ontologically diverse than Heidegger opened up for. Heidegger described the relation of Dasein to itself and to other human beings and argued that we deal with the environment in a practical and a theoretical mode. I expand on this and present a more coherent picture of four different dimensions in the human being’s sporting exploration of the world.     

Encountering the Body at the Site of the Suicide: A Population‐Based Survey in Sweden

Encountering the body of a child who died by suicide at the site of death is believed to be especially harmful for bereaved parents. We investigated the association between encountering the body at the site of the suicide and psychological distress in 666 suicide‐bereaved parents. Parents who had encountered their child's body at the site of the suicide (n = 147) did not have a higher risk of nightmares (relative risk [RR] 0.95, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.67–1.35), intrusive memories (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.84–1.13), avoidance of thoughts (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.74–1.27), avoidance of places or things (RR 0.91, 95% CI 0.66–1.25), anxiety (RR 0.93, 95% CI 0.64–1.33), or depression (RR 0.94, 95% CI 0.63–1.42) compared with parents who had not encountered the body (n = 512). Our results suggest that losing a child by suicide is sufficiently disastrous by itself to elicit posttraumatic responses or psychiatric morbidity whether or not the parent has encountered the deceased child at the site of death.