Women in group and women's groups

Female development is characterized by the introjection of maternal and paternal objects, which creates a rich internal world for women. However, the feminine tendency to become diffused in identifications sometimes results in women feeling overpowered in mixed-gender groups. The author advocates women's groups for the traditionally "feminine" woman, that is, the woman who has a rather impoverished sense of self in terms of her internalized objects. Women's groups are also helpful during adolescence, pregnancy, and menopause, milestones of female development. These are times when women are in profound crisis and may find it difficult to speak about these quintessentially feminine events in the presence of men.     

Emotional stimuli, divided attention, and memory

The emotion-memory literature has shown that negative emotional arousal enhances memory. S. A. Christianson (1992) proposed that preattentive processing could account for this emotion-memory relationship. Two experiments were conducted to test Christianson's theory. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to neutral and negative arousing slides. In Experiment 2, participants were exposed to neutral, negative arousing, and positive arousing slides. In both experiments, the aforementioned variable was factorially combined with a divided-attention or non-divided-attention condition. The authors predicted that, in contrast to the nondivided condition, dividing attention would adversely impact neutral and positive stimuli more than negative stimuli. The hypothesis was supported; participants recalled more high negative-arousal slides than positive or neutral slides when their attention was divided rather than nondivided.     

Attachment Relationships as Predictors of Cognitive Interpretation and Response Bias in Late Adolescence

We investigated behavioural and cognitive representations of attachment style. Specifically, we sought to test continuity in attachment style and whether participants' perceptions of their attachments to parents, peers, and romantic partners would predict cognitive interpretation and responses to 12 ambiguous situation scenarios. Participants were 161 undergraduate students (17–20 years) who completed the Parental Bonding Instrument, the Attachment Style Questionnaire and the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (peer subscale). Participants then indicated whether they interpreted ambiguous situations as threatening versus non-threatening and how they would respond (proactively, aggressively, or avoidantly). Regression analyses revealed that insecure parental attachments were the main predictor of participants' interpretations and their planned responses, followed by romantic attachments. Peer attachments played little role in the predictions. These results suggest that interpretation of situations and subsequent plans of action may be influenced by attachment related experiences. We discuss our findings in terms of their relevance to attachment theory and their application to our understanding of the concepts of attachment in development of interpersonal relationships.     

The effect of divided attention on false memory depends on how memory is tested

In three experiments, we investigated the effects of divided attention on false memory, using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants studied six DRM lists with full attention and six in one of two divided-attention conditions (random number generation or digit monitoring). Both divided-attention conditions increased false recall of related words (Experiment 1) but reduced false recognition (Experiment 2). These results were confirmed in Experiment 3, in which the type of secondary task was manipulated within groups. We argue that the increase in false recall with divided attention reflects a change in participants' response criterion, whereas the decrease in false recognition occurs because the secondary tasks prevent participants from generating associates of the words presented at study.     

Cognitive imitation in typically-developing 3- and 4-year olds and individuals with autism

Individuals diagnosed with autism suffer from numerous social, affective and linguistic impairments. It has also been suggested that they have a global imitation deficit. That hypothesis, however, is compromised by the fact that individuals with autism suffer from various motor impairments. Here we describe an experiment on cognitive imitation, a type of imitation that doesn’t require motor learning. Nine male autistic subjects and 20 typically-developing 3- and 4-year olds were trained to respond, in a prescribed order, to different lists of photographs that were displayed simultaneously on a touch-sensitive monitor. Because the position of the photographs varied randomly from trial to trial, sequences could not be learned by motor imitation. In three different imitation treatments, including a ghost control, autistic subjects learned new sequences more rapidly after observing a model execute those sequences than when they had to learn new sequences entirely by trial and error. Moreover, the performance of autistic subjects did not significantly differ from the performance of typically-developing controls. The result of this and other studies suggests that individuals with autism suffer from a specific novel motor imitation deficit.     

When Sleeping Dogs Awake,There Is Wisdom: Holmes’s Response to Guralnik,White, and Tummala-Nara

Whether the three discussions are framed in terms of the pull on all of us to the socio-political world in which we live (Guralnik), the usefulness of interpersonal psychoanalysis as a way of working (White), or the need to legitimize culturally imposed trauma in the face of resistances to doing so (Tummala-Narra), each commentator offers meaningful elaborations on what I have offered and/or alternative perspectives to be considered. This response affords me a welcome opportunity to celebrate and elaborate the multiple ways in which culture and cultural trauma can be conceptualized, understood, and worked with in the consultation room. I hope these papers, considered together, will make cultural trauma more accessible to work with for all psychoanalytic clinicians.     

Framework analysis: a worked example of a study exploring young people’s experiences of depression

Framework analysis is an approach to qualitative research that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines, including psychology, social policy, and nursing research. The stages of framework analysis have been described in published work, but the literature is lacking in articles describing how to conduct it in practice, particularly in the field of psychology, where researchers may be working as part of a team. Having used framework analysis on a study exploring adolescents’ experiences of depression, we faced various challenges along the way and learned from experience how to use this approach to qualitative analysis. In this reflective article, we describe a worked example of using framework, which we hope will assist other researchers in deciding if this approach is suitable for their own research, and will provide guidance on how one might go about conducting framework analysis when working as part of a research team. We conclude that framework is a valuable contribution to qualitative methods in psychology, offering a pragmatic, flexible and rigorous approach to data analysis.