Guirlanda's question

Abstract

Ruth was an attractive, single woman in her late 30s, well-placed at the executive level of a large corporation. When she had been offered the job a couple of years before beginning analysis with me, it had seemed to her like a dream come true. She would have the opportunity to work at the top levels of a large company, report to the president, and earn a sizeable salary. Best of all, the company was embarking on a major transformation of its internal structure. This was an old, established organization that badly needed to change its outmoded ways, introduce new technology, and re-educate its middle-level managers. Now, there would be change: Creativity and new ideas were highly prized by the president, and a top-flight consultant had been hired to “shake things up.”     

Cultural differences in self‐recognition: the early development of autonomous and related selves?

Fifteen‐ to 18‐month‐old infants from three nationalities were observed interacting with their mothers and during two self‐recognition tasks. Scottish interactions were characterized by distal contact, Zambian interactions by proximal contact, and Turkish interactions by a mixture of contact strategies. These culturally distinct experiences may scaffold different perspectives on self. In support, Scottish infants performed best in a task requiring recognition of the self in an individualistic context (mirror self‐recognition), whereas Zambian infants performed best in a task requiring recognition of the self in a less individualistic context (body‐as‐obstacle task). Turkish infants performed similarly to Zambian infants on the body‐as‐obstacle task, but outperformed Zambians on the mirror self‐recognition task. Verbal contact (a distal strategy) was positively related to mirror self‐recognition and negatively related to passing the body‐as‐obstacle task. Directive action and speech (proximal strategies) were negatively related to mirror self‐recognition. Self‐awareness performance was best predicted by cultural context; autonomous settings predicted success in mirror self‐recognition, and related settings predicted success in the body‐as‐obstacle task. These novel data substantiate the idea that cultural factors may play a role in the early expression of self‐awareness. More broadly, the results highlight the importance of moving beyond the mark test, and designing culturally sensitive tests of self‐awareness.     

What matters in implicit task sequence learning: perceptual stimulus features, task sets, or correlated streams of information?

Implicit task sequence learning may be attributed to learning the order of perceptual stimulus features associated with the task sequence, learning a series of automatic task set activations, or learning an integrated sequence that derives from 2 correlated streams of information. In the present study, our purpose was to distinguish among these 3 possibilities. In 4 separate experiments, we replicated and extended a previous study by Heuer, Schmidtke, and Kleinsorge (2001). The presence or absence of a sequence of tasks, as well as that of a sequence of different task-to-response mappings, was manipulated independently within experiments. Evidence of implicit sequence learning was found only when correlated sequences of tasks and mappings were present. No sequence learning effects were found when only a single task sequence or a single mapping sequence was present, even when the structure of the single sequence was identical to the structure of the integrated sequence of task-mapping combinations. These results suggest that implicit task sequence learning is not dependent on either perceptual learning of stimulus features or automatic task-set activation per se. Rather, it appears to be driven by correlated streams of information.     

Work Values and Their Effect on Work Behavior and Work Outcomes in Female and Male Managers

A longitudinal sample of over 800 MBA graduates surveyed across a 16-year period was recruited to investigate the relationship of work values to work effort, salary levels, and other work outcomes. As predicted, certain work values were related to higher salary levels and to the number of hours worked. Changing companies more often and receiving more promotions were also significantly related to work values. Work values did not differ for women and men in the sample, except that women were higher in the value of wanting to do an excellent job. Controlling for work values did not explain significantly higher salaries for men as compared to women. Implications of these data are discussed.     

Implementation of outpatient schema therapy for borderline personality disorder with versus without crisis support by the therapist outside office hours: A randomized trial

Objective

This study aimed to evaluate the success of implementing outpatient schema focused therapy (ST) for borderline patients in regular mental healthcare and to determine the added value of therapist telephone availability outside office hours in case of crisis (TTA).

Methods

To enhance the implementation, the following adaptations regarding the original ST protocol were applied: a reduction in the frequency and duration of the therapy; training therapists of eight regular healthcare centers in ST with a structured and piloted program supported by a set of films (DVDs) with examples of ST techniques; training and supervision given by Dutch experts. Telephone availability outside office hours was randomly allocated to 50% of the therapists of each treatment center. Patient's outcome measures were assessed with a semi-structured interview and self-report measures on BPD, quality of life, general psychopathology and an ST questionnaire, before, during and after treatment.

Results

Data on 62 DSM-IV defined BPD patients were available. Intention-to-treat analyses showed that after 1.5 years of ST 42% of the patients had recovered from BPD.No added value of therapist telephone availability (TTA) was found on the BPDSI score nor on any other measure after 1.5 years of ST.

Conclusions

ST for BPD can be successfully implemented in regular mental healthcare. Treatment results and dropout were comparable to a previous clinical trail. No additional effect of extra crisis support with TTA outside office hours ST was found.     

Cognitive and Interpersonal Predictors of Stress Generation in Children of Affectively Ill Parents

Stress generation is a process in which individuals, through their depressive symptoms, personal characteristics, and/or behaviors, contribute to the occurrence of stressful life events. While this process has been well documented in adults, few studies have examined it in children. The present study examines whether cognitive and interpersonal vulnerability factors to depression contribute to stress generation in children, independent of their current depressive symptoms. Participants included 140 children (ages 6 to 14) and one of their parents. During an initial assessment, children completed self-report measures assessing cognitive and interpersonal vulnerability factors to depression. Children and their parents also completed measures assessing depressive symptoms. One year later, children and their parents participated in a semi-structured interview assessing the occurrence of stressful life events in the past year. Multi-level modeling results provided strong support for the stress generation process in children of affectively ill parents and highlight the importance of considering gender and age moderation effects.

Adults sexually abused as children: Legal actions and Issues

This article first briefly discusses the problem of delayed memories and long-term effects of child sexual abuse and the current trend to bring civil lawsuits or criminal prosecutions for childhood sexual abuse. The article addresses the primary obstacle to such actions—the statute of limitations—which in most states places a time limit on when legal actions can be commenced. It describes the purpose of the statute of limitations and the need for changing or extending it in child sexual abuse cases; it then summarizes and analyzes the methods used by state legislation and judicial decisions to change or extend the statute of limitations in both criminal and civil actions. The article examines the pros and cons of bringing legal actions for child sexual abuse many years later, and concludes with a discussion regarding the current debate about the accuracy and authenticity of long-term memory and the advisability of legal reforms to extend or eliminate the statute of limitations in this area.     

Place recognition and way finding by children and adults

Children and adults were escorted on their first walk across our university campus and were periodically led off the original route during the return trip. During the return, we stopped prior to intersections on and off the original route to obtain estimates of place recognition accuracy and confidence. The subjects were then asked to point to the path that led back to the start and were corrected if wrong. Accuracy of place recognition was intermediate in a way-finding task requiring reversal of an incidentally learned novel route. However, accuracy increased as subjects were farther from the original route, indicating that the presence of novel landmarks boosted the discrimination of old and new places. Eight-year-old children were less accurate than 12-year-old children and 25-year-old adults, who did not differ in accuracy. There was a similar age difference in the ability to point to the direction to return when subjects correctly recognized that they were off route. The results are used to develop a model of way finding by place recognition.     

Is speed of information processing related to fluid or to crystallized intelligence?

Speed of information processing was examined in relation to the theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Sixty sixth grade children completed the Standard Progressive Matrices test and the Mill Hill Vocabulary scale, both untimed, as measures of fluid and crystallized intelligence, and three RT tasks: Memory Scanning, Picture Identification, and Sentence-Picture Comparison. As predicted, RT parameters, with the exception of slope on two tasks, were negatively correlated with scores on both tests. There were no consistent differences between the two tests in the size of correlations with RT, and partial correlations, eliminating the effects of fluid and crystallized intelligence respectively, failed to support any causal relationship between fluid and crystallized intelligence in either direction. Some limitations of the research, specifically in the possible effect of error rates on the speed-intelligence relationship, and in the application to individuals of task parameters derived from group performance, are noted.