Self–Compassion as Self-Care: A Simple and Effective Tool for Counselor Educators and Counseling Students

This article explores teaching self-compassion as a means of self-care for counseling graduate students. Self-care is vital to helping professionals, but few students learn specific self-care skills to integrate into their own self-care practice. Self-compassion is a simple practice used in the immediate moment or as an activity at home. The authors describe Kristen Neff’s model of self-compassion. The authors discuss the benefits of self-compassion as self-care and explain its practice as an effective avenue to increase compassion and relationship building with clients. In addition, they clarify how self-compassion practices strengthen relational connection. The writers describe three examples of self-care practices, and share suggestions for counselor educators to integrate self-care into graduate counselor training.     

Loss of emotional insight in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia or "frontal anosodiaphoria"

Loss of insight is a prominent clinical manifestation of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), but its characteristics are poorly understood. Twelve bvFTD patients were compared with 12 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients on a structured insight interview of cognitive insight (awareness of having a disorder) and emotional insight (concern over having a disorder). Compared to the AD patients, the bvFTD patients were less aware and less concerned about their disorder, and they had less appreciation of its effects on themselves and on others. After corrective feedback (“updating”), the bvFTD patients were just as aware of their disorder as the AD patients but remained unconcerned and unappreciative of its effects. These findings suggest that lack of insight in bvFTD is not due to “anosognosia,” or impaired cognitive and executive awareness of disease, but to “frontal anosodiaphoria,” or lack of emotional concern over having bvFTD and its impact on themselves and others.     

Working memory deficits, increased anxiety-like traits, and seizure susceptibility in BDNF overexpressing mice

BDNF regulates components of cognitive processes and has been implicated in psychiatric disorders. Here we report that genetic overexpression of the BDNF mature isoform (BDNF-tg) in female mice impaired working memory functions while sparing components of fear conditioning. BDNF-tg mice also displayed reduced breeding efficiency, higher anxiety-like scores, high self-grooming, impaired prepulse inhibition, and higher susceptibility to seizures when placed in a new empty cage, as compared with wild-type (WT) littermate controls. Control measures of general health, locomotor activity, motor coordination, depression-related behaviors, and sociability did not differ between genotypes. The present findings, indicating detrimental effects of life-long increased BDNF in mice, may inform human studies evaluating the role of BDNF functional genetic variations on cognitive abilities and vulnerability to psychiatric disorders.     

Interactions between statistical and semantic information in infant language development

Infants can use statistical regularities to form rudimentary word categories (e.g. noun, verb), and to learn the meanings common to words from those categories. Using an artificial language methodology, we probed the mechanisms by which two types of statistical cues (distributional and phonological regularities) affect word learning. Because linking distributional cues vs. phonological information to semantics make different computational demands on learners, we also tested whether their use is related to language proficiency. We found that 22-month-old infants with smaller vocabularies generalized using phonological cues; however, infants with larger vocabularies showed the opposite pattern of results, generalizing based on distributional cues. These findings suggest that both phonological and distributional cues marking word categories promote early word learning. Moreover, while correlations between these cues are important to forming word categories, we found infants' weighting of these cues in subsequent word-learning tasks changes over the course of early language development.     

Procedural misconceptions and informed consent: insights from empirical research on the clinical trials industry

This paper provides a simultaneously reflexive and analytical framework to think about obstacles to truly informed consent in social science and biomedical research. To do so, it argues that informed consent often goes awry due to procedural misconceptions built into the research context. The concept of procedural misconception is introduced to describe how individuals respond to what is familiar in research settings and overlook what is different. In the context of biomedical research, procedural misconceptions can be seen to function as root causes of therapeutic misconceptions.     

A cultural-contextual perspective on the validity of the MMPI-2 with American Indians

This study investigated the normative validity of the MMPI-2 with two distinct American Indian tribes. Differences occurred on 8 of the 13 basic validity and clinical scales (F, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) between the MMPI-2 norms and both tribal samples. Elevated MMPI-2 scores of American Indians may not only reflect the possibility of psychological distress spurred by historical oppression and present adversity, but also an expression of a divergent worldview. Considering the context of the historical and social production of knowledge about American Indians, it is argued that researchers and practitioners, when interpreting MMPI-2 results for American Indians, should seriously consider their interpretive points of reference, which may be impacted by dominant cultural belief systems.     

Stimulus selectivity of figural aftereffects for faces

Viewing a distorted face induces large aftereffects in the appearance of an undistorted face. The authors examined the processes underlying this adaptation by comparing how selective the aftereffects are for different dimensions of the images including size, spatial frequency content, contrast, and color. Face aftereffects had weaker selectivity for changes in the size, contrast, or color of the images and stronger selectivity for changes in contrast polarity or spatial frequency. This pattern could arise if the adaptation is contingent on the perceived similarity of the stimuli as faces. Consistent with this, changing contrast polarity or spatial frequency had larger effects on the perceived identity of a face, and aftereffects were also selective for different individual faces. These results suggest that part of the sensitivity changes underlying the adaptation may arise at visual levels closely associated with the representation of faces.     

Dynamic averaging and foraging decisions in horses (Equus callabus)

The variability of most environments taxes foraging decisions by increasing the uncertainty of the information available. One solution to the problem is to use dynamic averaging, as do some granivores and carnivores. Arguably, the same strategy could be useful for grazing herbivores, even though their food renews and is more homogeneously distributed. Horses (Equus callabus) were given choices between variable patches after short or long delays. When patch information was current, horses returned to the patch that was recently best, whereas those without current information matched choices to the long-term average values of the patches. These results demonstrate that a grazing species uses dynamic averaging and indicate that, like granivores and carnivores, they can use temporal weighting to optimize foraging decisions.     

Factor Structure of the Parenting Scale in a Low-Income African American Sample

We evaluated the relative goodness-of-fit of two factor structures of the Parenting Scale (Arnold, O'Leary, Wolf, {&} Acker, 1993) among two samples of low-income African American families. Participants included 271 mother-child dyads from urban and rural areas in the southern and southeastern US, who completed the Parenting Scale along with other measures of parenting style and dyadic relationship. Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) indicated that a two-factor solution, comprising Laxness and Overreactivity dimensions, was the better fit to the data. Some direct evidence for convergent validity was provided by a correlation between the Laxness factor of the Parenting Scale and the Firm/Lax Control subscale of the Children's Report of Parenting Behavior Inventory (CRPBI). Results are discussed in term of Brody and Flor's (1998) “no nonsense” parenting style.     

Musical stem completion: humming that note

This study looked at how people store and retrieve tonal music explicitly and implicitly using a production task. Participants completed an implicit task (tune stem completion) followed by an explicit task (cued recall). The tasks were identical except for the instructions at test time. They listened to tunes and were then presented with tune stems from previously heard tunes and novel tunes. For the implicit task, they were asked to sing a note they thought would come next musically. For the explicit task, they were asked to sing the note they remembered as coming next. Experiment 1 found that people correctly completed significantly more old stems than new stems. Experiment 2 investigated the characteristics of music that fuel retrieval by varying a surface feature of the tune (same timbre or different timbre) from study to test and the encoding task (semantic or nonsemantic). Although we did not find that implicit and explicit memory for music were significantly dissociated for levels of processing, we did find that surface features of music affect semanticjudgments and subsequent explicit retrieval.