Eating disorders in the course of life: A qualitative approach to vital change

Eating disorders (EDs) have become one of the biggest mental-health problems in the last decades, especially among youth and women. The present study aims to analyse the suitability of Prochaska and DiClemente’s Transtheoretical Model of Change when applied to the living experiences of people diagnosed with ED and their carers. For this purpose, we applied a narrative biographic approach to the ways in which people face their problems and vital development in the ED domain. Through the narrative analysis of these autobiographies, we aimed to study the patients’ own notions of ‘change’, ‘problem’ and ‘vital trajectory’. We focused on five autobiographic interviews of persons diagnosed as ED (four women and a man). The analysis yields three discourses which organize and give sense to our participants’ vital transitions: a discourse of functional adaptation to events and experiences; one that pays attention to random events and people entering your life; and one that has the personal initiative and agency of an individual agent at its core. It also illuminates particular ways of understanding determination, contemplation and pre-contemplation. These ways of understanding change are shown to extend the possible ways of thinking about people’s lives and ED patients’ perspectives.     

The politics of insight

Previous studies showed that liberals and conservatives differ in cognitive style. Liberals are more flexible, and tolerant of complexity and novelty, whereas conservatives are more rigid, are more resistant to change, and prefer clear answers. We administered a set of compound remote associate problems, a task extensively used to differentiate problem-solving styles (via insight or analysis). Using this task, several researches have proven that self-reports, which differentiate between insight and analytic problem-solving, are reliable and are associated with two different neural circuits. In our research we found that participants self-identifying with distinct political orientations demonstrated differences in problem-solving strategy. Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion. Our findings extend previous observations that self-identified political orientations reflect differences in cognitive styles. More specifically, we show that type of political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy. The data converge with previous neurobehavioural and cognitive studies indicating a link between cognitive style and the psychological mechanisms that mediate political beliefs.     

Alexithymia and psychosocial problems among Italian preadolescents. A latent class analysis approach

The study, conducted on Italian preadolscents aged 11 to 13 belonging to the general population, aims to investigate the relationship between the emotional functioning, namely, alexithymia, and the risk of developing behavioral and emotional problems measured using the Strength and Difficulty Questionnaire. The latent class analysis approach allowed to identify two latent variables, accounting for the internalizing (emotional symptoms and difficulties in emotional awareness) and for the externalizing problems (conduct problems and hyperactivity, problematic relationships with peers, poor prosocial behaviors and externally oriented thinking). The two latent variables featured two latent classes: the difficulty in dealing with problems and the strength to face problems that was representative of most of the healthy participants with specific gender differences. Along with the analysis of psychopathological behaviors, the study of resilience and strengths can prove to be a key step in order to develop valuable preventive approaches to tackle psychiatric disorders.     

Challenging assignments and activating mood: the influence of goal orientation

We examined the impact of induced goal orientation on individuals' positive‐ and negative‐activating mood when taking part in high‐ or low‐challenging assignments. Results indicated that performing a low‐challenging assignment leads to a higher positive‐activating mood with a performance‐approach orientation than with a mastery approach, or no goal orientation. In contrast, conducting a high‐challenging assignment leads to a higher positive‐activating mood with a mastery approach than with a performance approach, or no goal orientation. These findings suggest that high‐challenging assignments are best instructed with a focus on learning whereas low‐challenging assignments are best instructed with a focus on superior performance.     

Association between brain activation (fMRI), cognition and school performance in extremely preterm and term born children

The purpose of the study was to investigate a possible association between brain activation in functional magnetic resonance imaging scans, cognition and school performance in extremely preterm children and term born controls. Twenty eight preterm and 28 term born children were scanned while performing a working memory/selective attention task, and school results from national standardized tests were collected. Brain activation maps reflected difference in cognitive skills but not in school performance. Differences in brain activation were found between children born preterm and at term, and between high and low performers in cognitive tests. However, the differences were located in different brain areas. The implication may be that lack of cognitive skills does not alone explain low performance due to prematurity.     

DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARENT‐CHILD PLAY SCALE FOR USE IN CHILDREN WITH FEEDING DISORDERS

The Parent‐Child Play Scale was developed as a scale that complements the Parent‐Child Feeding Scale, created by I. Chatoor et al. (1997), to evaluate mother–infant/toddler interactions in two different caregiving contexts of a young child's everyday life, specifically play and feeding. This Play Scale can be used with infants and toddlers ranging in age from 1 month to 3 years and provides reliable global ratings of mother–child interactions during 10 min of videotaped free‐play in a laboratory setting. The scale consists of 32 mother and infant/toddler interactive behaviors which are rated by trained observers from videotaped observations. Four subscales are derived: Dyadic Reciprocity, Maternal Unresponsiveness to Infant's/Toddler's Cues, Dyadic Conflict, and Maternal Intrusiveness. Construct validity and interrater and test‐retest reliability of the Play Scale have been demonstrated. This Play Scale discriminates between children with and without feeding disorders as well as between children with different subtypes of feeding disorders as defined by the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood, Revised (DC:0–3R) (Feeding Disorder of State Regulation, Feeding Disorder of Caregiver‐Infant Reciprocity, and Infantile Anorexia). It can be used for research or clinical practice in the diagnosis and treatment of early feeding problems, to assess the pervasiveness of mother–infant/toddler difficulties and to monitor changes following therapy.     

Applicant impression management in job interview: The moderating role of interviewer affectivity

In light of the organizational need to obtain talented personnel, an appropriate evaluation of applicant behaviour in the selection interview is crucial. Extending past research on applicant use of impression management (IM) tactics, this study examines the effects of a broad set of IM tactics in a field setting, and also investigates the moderating roles of two rarely tested interviewer characteristics: interviewer positive affectivity (PA) and negative affectivity (NA). Due to the nested nature of the data, consisting of 142 job applicants and 33 interviewers, we adopt hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) to examine the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that three IM tactics (self‐focused IM, SFIM; other‐focused IM, OFIM; and non‐verbal IM, NVIM) are significantly positively related to interviewer evaluations. Furthermore, interviewer PA appears to strengthen the positive effects of SFIM tactics on interviewer evaluations, while the effects of NVIM tactics may be weaker when interviewers are high in NA. In addition, these findings suggest the importance of interviewer trait affectivity in explaining interviewer's decision‐making variability, which may lead to low inter‐rater reliability and in turn restrict the level of achievable validity.