Leaning Into Termination

Ending treatment is inevitably filled with multiple and disparate losses for the analytic dyad. The author sets forth a call for reconsidering termination from a Relational perspective. She argues that many, if not all, terminations, are primed for enactment. The mutual processes of attaching and detaching, of growing close and then saying goodbye elicit powerful feelings and equally powerful dissociative processes. Specifically, she suggests that termination can be understood as co-created enactments of complex unconscious processes between patient and analyst. There is some necessary integrative work that may possible only when ending treatment. Key to this integrative work is the acceptance of both the achievements and the limitations of analytic work for both participants. She argues that we need to suspend our analytic ambition and begin to formulate what a co-created and mutually enacted good-enough ending would look like.     

Weeds on the Ruins: Agency,Compromise Formation,and the Quest for Intersubjective Truth

Using Kundera's metaphor of “weeds on the ruins” to examine the impact of organized destruction of memory on the survival of a people, this paper explores the role of symptoms in negotiating a relational “compromise formation” by tracing their evolution as signifiers of previously dissociated intersubjective knowledge. It suggests that recent theorizing on the mutual constitution of agency and intersubjectivity creates the possibility of resurrecting the dramatic tension that characterized dual drive theory by relocating that tension between the desire to know (oneself, the Other) and the destruction of that desire. To do so, the paper contemplates an internally consistent lens for reconciling the terrain of deficit and dissociation with that of conflict by offering a process-oriented view of agency as “drive” that is rooted between subjective and material contexts. Finally, the paper explores the quest for intersubjective truth as offering a means of living beyond the ubiquity of compromise formation.     

Resource depletion does not influence prospective memory in college students

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate the potential influence of prior acts of self-control on subsequent prospective memory performance. College undergraduates (n = 146) performed either a cognitively depleting initial task (e.g., mostly incongruent Stroop task) or a less resource-consuming version of that task (e.g., all congruent Stroop task). Subsequently, participants completed a prospective memory task that required attentionally demanding monitoring processes. The results demonstrated that prior acts of self-control do not impair the ability to execute a future intention in college-aged adults. We conceptually replicated these results in three additional depletion and prospective memory experiments. This research extends a growing number of studies demonstrating the boundary conditions of the resource depletion effect in cognitive tasks.     

Attitudes towards credit and finances among college students in China and the United States

Although there is growing concern about the issue of credit card debt among college students in China, little research has examined attitudes to money and debt among that group. The present study compared financial self‐confidence, perceived financial wellbeing, attitudes to debt, and parent education about money and debt in 410 college students from the US and China. Although college students in China reported fewer credit cards and less debt, they also reported lower levels of financial self‐confidence and financial wellbeing. In both cultures, delay of gratification and parental education predicted both self‐confidence and financial wellbeing.     

Control of Integrated Task Sequences Shapes Components of Reaching

Reaching toward an object usually consists of a sequence of elemental actions. Using a reaching task sequence, the authors investigated how task elements of that sequence affected feedforward and feedback components of the reaching phase of the movement. Nine right-handed adults performed, with their dominant and nondominant hands, 4 tasks of different complexities: a simple reaching task; a reach-to-grasp task; a reach-to-grasp and lift object task; and a reach-to-grasp, lift, and place object task. Results showed that in the reach-to-grasp and lift object task more time was allocated to the feedforward component of the reach phase, while latency between the task elements decreased. We also found between-hand differences, supporting previous findings of increased efficiency of processing planning-related information in the preferred hand. The presence of task-related modifications supports the concept of contextual effects when planning a movement.     

A Method for the Evaluation of Affective Associations to Figure Drawings

Usual scoring systems for figure drawing techniques are based on structural and content aspects of the drawing, and ignore the affectively toned associations that occur when an observer first sees a drawing. A system for measuring two components of judgment, (a) emission of affective associations (b) evaluation of affective associations, has been developed. This method was applied with some success in studying individuals who had represented in their drawings an image that corresponded to their actual physical appearance. The research so far suggests that the evaluation component of judgment may contribute more to discrimination than the emission component.     

Mental Health and Adverse Childhood Experiences

The theoretical basis of occupational therapy interventions was investigated in two mental health facilities in the Midwestern United States. Using retrospective cohort and grounded theory designs, 121 medical records were reviewed and five occupational therapy practitioners were interviewed. Theoretical reasoning was not explicitly documented, but according to analysis, the behavioral/cognitive-behavioral model, client-centered models, and the model of human occupation were the most frequently used theories to guide interventions. Lack of documentation of theory use has significant implications for the value accorded to occupational therapy skills in health care. A larger study is recommended to increase external generalizability of the findings.     

Developing Roles and Skills in Community-Living Adults With Severe and Persistent Mental Illness

People with severe and persistent mental illness often experience a disruption in the development of social roles, and the skills within these roles. Role Development, a set of guidelines for practice, is an intervention to develop roles and skills. The purpose of this study was to continue to examine the efficacy of this intervention. Ten people attending two community mental health programs participated in evaluation and treatment based on Role Development. Quantitative pretest and posttest measures were used. Qualitative components were incorporated to get a sense of the experience involved in developing roles and skills. Quantitative results indicated statistical significance (p < .05) in the development of roles and skills. Qualitative data revealed multiple trends experienced by the participants. This study contributes to the evidenced-based knowledge regarding development of roles and skills for persons living with severe and persistent mental illness.     

The Relationship of Korean Students’ Age and Years of English-as-a-Foreign-Language Exposure with English-Reading Ability: A Cross-Age Study

The differences in spelling error features among learning disabled and normal students spelling instructionally on four grade levels of achievement were investigated. The categories of errors were determined by invented spelling research. The results indicated that the ranking of error features for each group were significantly correlated, and that the range of individual variation about the mean group pattern of spelling error variables was highly similar at each level of achievement. The findings are congruent with the theory of developmental word knowledge and support the position that learning disabled and normally achieving children acquire specific aspects of English orthography in highly similar progressions.