Putting down roots: the significance of technical adaptations in the therapeutic process with fostered and adopted children‡

Severely neglected and traumatised children have also suffered from a lack of the parental nurturing which is needed for ordinary emotional development to take place. Often their past experiences make them unable to utilise the nurturing that foster and adoptive families try to give them and they are delayed or stuck in their development. In therapy, when the early small signs of new emotional development start to emerge, they may be heralded by technical challenges to the therapist. Two examples are given in this paper, which are discussed in the context of Stern et al.’s ideas about moments of meeting, Winnicott’s concepts about transitional phenomena and playing, and Hurry and her colleagues’ thoughts about the therapist as a developmental object. It is argued that it is important for the therapist to be alert to the possible significance of these technical adaptations in terms of the child’s capacity for new emotional development. These often indicate that a watershed in the treatment has been reached and if positively responded to, that the patient is in the process of ‘putting down roots’ in the ground of the therapeutic relationship and starting to grow across a spectrum of developmental pathways.     

Interrelationships and Continuities in Symptoms of Oppositional Defiant and Conduct Disorders from Age 4 to 10 in the Community

Childhood oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) has commonly been thought to increase the risk of conduct disorder (CD) in late childhood and adolescence. However, symptoms of CD may also emerge during preschool and middle childhood. The few studies that have examined whether ODD increases the risk of such early onset CD have produced equivocal results, potentially due to methodological issues. In this study, a community sample of Norwegian 4-year-olds (n = 1042, 49.9 % males) was examined bi-annually over four waves of data collection. Symptoms of ODD, CD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety and depressive disorders were measured through interviews with parents and children using the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment and the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Assessment. The results showed that at all ages, more symptoms of ODD predicted more symptoms of CD at the next age of examination even after adjusting for previous CD and comorbid conditions. The effect of previous ODD on CD two years later did not differ according to gender, SES, or parental cohabitating status at any point in time. There was modest homotypical continuity in symptoms of CD and moderate homotypical continuity in symptoms of ODD. Symptoms of ODD increased from age 4 to 8 and declined to age 10. In conclusion, symptoms of ODD increase the risk of early onset symptoms of CD. The continuity in symptoms of ODD, and to some extent CD, combined with an increased risk of early symptoms of CD forecasted by symptoms of ODD, underscore the importance of detection, prevention and treatment of behavioral disorders already in early childhood.     

Associations Between Self-Esteem,General Self-Efficacy,and Approaches to Studying in Occupational Therapy Students: A Cross-Sectional Study

The aim of this study was to explore associations between self-esteem, general self-efficacy, and the deep, strategic, and surface approaches to studying. Norwegian occupational therapy students (n?=?125) completed questionnaires measuring study approaches, self-esteem, and general self-efficacy. Regression analyses were used to explore the direct relationships between self-esteem, general self-efficacy and the approaches to studying, after controlling for age, gender, prior higher education, and time spent on independent studying. General self-efficacy displayed positive associations with deep and strategic approaches to studying and a negative relationship with a surface approach to studying. Self-esteem was not significantly associated with approaches to studying.     

All in the first glance: first fixation predicts individual differences in valence bias*

Surprised expressions are interpreted as negative by some people, and as positive by others. When compared to fearful expressions, which are consistently rated as negative, surprise and fear share similar morphological structures (e.g. widened eyes), but these similarities are primarily in the upper part of the face (eyes). We hypothesised, then, that individuals would be more likely to interpret surprise positively when fixating faster to the lower part of the face (mouth). Participants rated surprised and fearful faces as either positive or negative while eye movements were recorded. Positive ratings of surprise were associated with longer fixation on the mouth than negative ratings. There were also individual differences in fixation patterns, with individuals who fixated the mouth earlier exhibiting increased positive ratings. These findings suggest that there are meaningful individual differences in how people process faces.     

Probabilities Associated with Precise and Vague Forecasts

Forecasts of future outcomes, such as the consequences of climate change, are given with different degrees of precision. Logically, more precise forecasts (e.g., a temperature increase of 3–4°) have a smaller probability of capturing the actual outcome than less precise forecasts (e.g., a temperature increase of 2–6°). Nevertheless, people often trust precise forecasts more than vague forecasts, perhaps because precision is associated with knowledge and expertise. In five experiments, we ask whether people expect highly confident forecasts to be associated with wider or narrower outcome ranges than less confident forecasts (Experiments 1, 2, and 5), and, conversely, whether they expect precise forecasts to be issued with higher or lower confidence than vague forecasts (Experiments 3 and 4). The results revealed two distinct ways of thinking about confidence intervals, labeled distributional (wide intervals seen as more probable than narrow intervals) and associative (wide intervals seen as more uncertain than narrow intervals). Distributional responses occurred somewhat more often in within‐subjects designs, where wide and narrow prediction intervals and high and low probability estimates can be directly compared, whereas separate evaluations (in between‐subjects design) suggested associative responses to be slightly more frequent. These findings are relevant for experts communicating forecasts through confidence intervals. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management Programme in Kindergartens: Effects of a Universal Preventive Effort

The purpose of this study was to identify preventive effects of the Incredible Years (IY) teacher classroom management (TCM) programme, which is employed in Norwegian kindergartens for 3-year-old to 6-year-old children. IY TCM is a universal preventive intervention intended to reduce the frequency of inappropriate types of behaviour and support children’s social- and emotional competence in kindergartens and schools. IY TCM was implemented in 46 kindergartens and compared to 46 matched kindergartens that did not receive the intervention. A total of 1049 children took part in the trial, 511 from the IY TCM group and 538 from the comparison group. Children’s behaviours were measured using well-validated instruments at the beginning and end of a school-year cycle, approximately 9 months later. Findings showed promising reductions in aggression, internalising and attention problems, and increases in social competence in the IY TCM kindergartens. In a sub-sample comprising children who scored equal to or above the 90th percentile on aggressive behaviour before the intervention, promising developments were found in social competence among the children in IY TCM kindergartens. The IY TCM lead to promising preventive effects in young children’s aggressive behaviours, internalisation, attention problems, and social competence in kindergartens in Norway. However, even if the changes were statistically significant, effect sizes were small. For children with severe behaviour problems, few positive results were found.     

Happiness in Behaviour Genetics: An Update on Heritability and Changeability

In this paper we summarize recent behaviour genetic findings on happiness measured as life satisfaction (LS) and subjective wellbeing (SWB) and discuss important implications pertaining to stability and change, including the potential of individual and societal interventions. Broadly speaking, two main research strategies explore genetic and environmental influences on happiness, including quantitative and molecular genetics. Whereas molecular genetics seeks to trace the causal pathways from specific DNA variants, quantitative genetics estimates the magnitude of overall genetic and environmental influences without specifying actual DNA sequences and usually without specifying specific environmental circumstances. Molecular genetic studies have entered the happiness arena, but have shown mixed results. Most replicated findings are therefore based on quantitative genetics and derived from twin and family studies decomposing variation and co-variation into genetic, shared, and non-shared environmental sources. Recent meta-analyses of such studies report genetic influences (i.e., heritability) to account for 32–40 % of the variation in overall happiness (i.e., SWB, LS), and indicate that heritability varies across populations, subgroups, contexts and/or constructs. When exploring stable SWB levels, heritability is reported in the 70–80 % range, whereas momentary positive affect is often entirely situational. Happiness is thus heritable, stable, variable and changeable. What do these findings imply? Can happiness be raised as a platform in individuals and societies? We suggest that individual and societal interventions that target causal pathways and address both amplifying and compensatory processes (i.e., focus on developing strengths and mitigating risks)—thus providing for positive gene-environment matchmaking, are likely to be effective and longer lasting.     

Maternal Emotion Socialization and the Development of Inhibitory Control in an Emotional Condition

Although several studies have implicated parental socialization in children's development of multiple executive functions, little is known about how parenting may predict inhibitory control when emotion is involved. In this study, 42 children completed two tasks with their mothers at 3.5 years. Maternal emotion language was coded during a storybook task, and maternal scaffolding was coded during a puzzle task. At 3.5 and 4 years, children's inhibitory control was assessed with Day–Night and Happy–Sad card games, Stroop‐like tasks that differ in that the latter contains emotion content. Accuracy and latency on Happy–Sad were predicted by maternal emotion language but not scaffolding. In contrast, latency on Day–Night was predicted by scaffolding but not emotion language. This shows context‐specificity in the links between parenting and cognitive control, such that emotion socialization predicted children's performance in an emotional context only, while more general scaffolding behaviours predicted inhibitory control in the non‐emotional condition. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Narrative and embodiment – a scalar approach

Recent work on the relation between narrative and selfhood has emphasized embodiment as an indispensable foundation for selfhood. This has occasioned an interesting debate on the relation between embodiment and narrative. In this paper, I attempt to mediate the range of conflicting intuitions within the debate by proposing a scalar approach to narrative and an accompanying concept of a split-self (Waldenfels 2000). Drawing on theoretical developments from contemporary narratology, I argue that we need to move away from a binary understanding of narrative as something an entity (the self) strictly is or is not; rather, we need to see narrative as an attribute admitting of degrees. I suggest that the relation between narrative and embodiment should be seen along these lines, proposing three levels of the narrativity of embodied experiencing: 1) the unnarratable, 2) the narratable and 3) the narrative. Finally, I discuss the implications this framework has for the general question of the narrative constitution of selfhood.     

Synergistic effects of pain and alcohol use in relation to depressive and anxiety symptoms among Latinos in primary care

Although past work has shown that alcohol use co-occurs with anxiety/depression among Latinos, little work has examined the variables that qualify such associations. The present investigation sought to address whether pain severity (i.e. pain intensity and/or pain-related disability, respectively) moderated relations between hazardous drinking and depressive/anxious arousal symptoms among an economically disadvantaged Latino sample recruited from a primary care medical setting. Participants included 253 adult Latinos (M_age = 38.5 years, SD = 10.8; 86.6% female) who attended a community-based primary care clinic. There was a significant interaction of hazardous drinking with pain intensity in relation to depressive symptoms and significant interactions of hazardous drinking and pain-related disability in relation to depressive and anxious arousal symptoms. Hazardous drinking was associated with more severe depressive/anxious arousal symptoms only when pain intensity/disability was high. This is the first study to demonstrate the moderating role of pain intensity and disability in associations between hazardous drinking and anxiety/depression among Latinos in a primary care medical setting.