A Mother,A Baby,and Two Treatment Approaches: Discussing A Switch Case from CBT and Mentalization Perspectives

ABSTRACT

As the literature on perinatal depression and anxiety grows, there is an increased need for dialogue among theoretical approaches for mother-infant mental health. This article describes a community mental health program incorporating a range of treatment models for pregnant and postpartum women experiencing issues during the transition to parenthood. Perinatal distress can affect parenting practices, from breastfeeding to health care access, creating the need for targeted, practical, and concrete interventions. Interventions that aim to foster secure attachment relationships and mentalization capacities can also help increase maternal sensitivity and attunement and joy in caregiving, and reduce withdrawn/hostile behaviors that may be associated with perinatal distress. The article describes psychotherapy with a mother and her newborn that began from a cognitive-behavioral approach and transitioned to a psychodynamic mentalization-focused treatment. Working principles and examples of two additional components of treatment, a group psychotherapy and research measures, are discussed. The case helps demonstrate how attachment theory can inform treatment and build a bridge between alternative approaches.     

Longitudinal evaluation of anhedonia as a mediator of fear of positive evaluation and other depressive symptoms

ABSTRACT

Fear of positive evaluation (FPE) is experiencing dread during real or potential praise. FPE is associated with social anxiety, but its relation to depressive symptoms is unclear. Anhedonia is a core symptom of depression related to symptoms of anxiety in cross-sectional research. The current study investigated the indirect effect of FPE on depressive symptoms via anhedonia over time. One-hundred ninety-six participants completed three waves of questionnaires over a total timespan of approximately four months via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, including measures of FPE, depressive symptoms, and anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia. Findings indicated that anticipatory anhedonia at Time 2 mediated the relationship between FPE at Time 1 and depressive symptoms at Time 3. Consummatory anhedonia, however, did not. Each model was contextualised by accounting for prospective covarying relationships, such as depressive symptoms predicting the same symptoms at later waves. The constellation of findings is considered within a reward devaluation framework.     

Equivalence‐based instruction of academic skills: Application to adolescents with autism

This study evaluated the efficacy of three equivalence‐based instruction procedures on the acquisition of novel academic skills by 3 adolescents diagnosed with autism in a school setting. The skills targeted for instruction were related to topics in history, science, and mathematics, and were taught using different training structures from the PEAK‐E curriculum. All participants demonstrated mastery of the trained relations and the tested derived relations following all variants of equivalence‐based instruction.     

The importance of laughing in your face: influences of visual laughter on auditory laughter perception

Hearing the sound of laughter is important for social communication, but processes contributing to the audibility of laughter remain to be determined. Production of laughter resembles production of speech in that both involve visible facial movements accompanying socially significant auditory signals. However, while it is known that speech is more audible when the facial movements producing the speech sound can be seen, similar visual enhancement of the audibility of laughter remains unknown. To address this issue, spontaneously occurring laughter was edited to produce stimuli comprising visual laughter, auditory laughter, visual and auditory laughter combined, and no laughter at all (either visual or auditory), all presented in four levels of background noise. Visual laughter and no-laughter stimuli produced very few reports of auditory laughter. However, visual laughter consistently made auditory laughter more audible, compared to the same auditory signal presented without visual laughter, resembling findings reported previously for speech.     

Incurious motives to seek information about potential threats

In Study 1, 20 incurious worry reduction motive (IWRM) items were administered to 280 participants along with curiosity and worry scales. With factor analysis, two six‐item scales were developed: focus on distress (IWRM‐FD) and focus on relief (IWRM‐FR). IWRM‐FD was associated with wanting positive news about threats, whereas IWRM‐FR was related to wanting negative news to be free from further worry. Neither the curiosity nor worry scales predicted wanting information. In Study 2, the IWRM scales were administered to 170 participants along with a coping inventory. IWRM‐FD correlated with avoidant‐coping, whereas IWRM‐FR was associated positively with active‐coping and advice‐seeking. The results suggest that IWRM‐FD reflects a desire to minimize distress, whereas IWRM‐FR motivates identifying and dealing directly with problems. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of domain and subject specialization on knowledge organization

Thematic organization is the association of information that is observed within a given time frame or event, and taxonomic organization is characterized by class membership based on featural overlap. Research in cognitive psychology has suggested a developmental progression in preference from thematic organization to taxonomic organization, with a preference for taxonomic organization seen as cognitively more advanced. However, recent research has found thematic preferences in adults and shown that organizational preference can be influenced by context and experience. This study expanded on previous findings of individual differences and explored preferences across different domains. Specifically, preferences for knowledge organization were measured between student type (history and psychology) and across content type (general and history). The results indicated that history material was more likely to be organized thematically than general material.     

Salary and Decision Making: Relationship Between Pay and Focus on Financial Profitability and Prosociality in an Organizational Context

This investigation examined the relationship between organizationally based financial incentives and a focus on profit vs. prosociality during decision making. Participants were 84 managers from a Fortune 200 corporation. Managers read a vignette containing a dilemma and freely generated issues that they considered important in resolving the dilemma. These responses were coded for their inclusion on 3 dimensions: financial profitability, well‐being of nonpowerful stakeholders, and legal culpability. The results demonstrated that salary level predicted an increased focus on the dimension related to financial profitability and decreased focus on the dimensions of prosociality and legal concerns. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.     

Ophthalmological,cognitive, electrophysiological and MRI assessment of visual processing in preterm children without major neuromotor impairment

Many studies report chronic deficits in visual processing in children born preterm. We investigated whether functional abnormalities in visual processing exist in children born preterm but without major neuromotor impairment (i.e. cerebral palsy). Twelve such children (< 33 weeks gestation or birthweight < 1000 g) without major neuromotor impairment and 12 born full‐term controls were assessed at 8–12 years of age by means of ophthalmological assessment (visual acuity, colour vision, stereopsis, stereoacuity, visual fields, ocular motility, motor fusion), cognitive tests of visual‐motor, visual‐perceptual and visual‐spatial skills and pattern‐reversal visual evoked potentials (PR‐VEPs). All participants also underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain and neuromotor assessments. No significant differences were found between the groups on the ophthalmological, visual cognitive, neurological, neuromotor or MRI measures. The P100 component of the PR‐VEP showed a significantly shorter latency in the preterm compared with the full‐term participants. Whilst this P100 finding suggests that subtle abnormalities may exist at the neurophysiological level, we conclude that visual dysfunction is not systematically associated with preterm birth in the context of normal neurological status.     

Origins of spatial, temporal and numerical cognition: Insights from comparative psychology

Contemporary comparative cognition has a large repertoire of animal models and methods, with concurrent theoretical advances that are providing initial answers to crucial questions about human cognition. What cognitive traits are uniquely human? What are the species-typical inherited predispositions of the human mind? What is the human mind capable of without certain types of specific experiences with the surrounding environment? Here, we review recent findings from the domains of space, time and number cognition. These findings are produced using different comparative methodologies relying on different animal species, namely birds and non-human great apes. The study of these species not only reveals the range of cognitive abilities across vertebrates, but also increases our understanding of human cognition in crucial ways.     

Scandalous: Christian identification,sex guilt,and the mediated demonization of the participants in the AshleyMadison scandal

In 2015, AshleyMadison.com (AshleyMadison) was hacked, leading to the release of site members’ personal information. The exposed members faced public scrutiny, judgment, and other negative outcomes. In this study, we examined predictors of the demonization of the AshleyMadison participants (i.e., AshleyMadison members, owners, hackers) to help explain victim derogation. We attempted to discern the role religiosity and sexual guilt played in the demonization of the AshleyMadison hacking participants. We predicted sexual guilt would mediate between religiosity and demonization of the AshleyMadison hacking participants. Our findings indicate that religiosity alone does not predict demonization. Instead, sex guilt was a necessary part of the equation and mediated between participants’ religiosity and the amount they demonized the different groups.