Love and melancholia in the analysis of women by women

This paper suggests that in the analysis of women by women a melancholic core may be encountered at the centre of the transference/countertransference situation that is an expression of the loss of the primary maternal object that has never been mourned. The attachment to the primary, lost object may be preserved in a melancholic, invisible way, and the longing that it is connected to might only reach representation in the après coup of the analytic process. The links between this primary love, melancholia and the unrepresentable in the analysis of women will be explored. These analyses powerfully evoke the relationship to the somatic. The internalization of the body of the mother, which is a requirement in the development of a woman, can take on frightening, fragmented, part‐object qualities. An example of a five times a week analysis is discussed.     

Investigating the effectiveness of brief cognitive reappraisal training to reduce fear in adolescents

As adolescent anxiety is common and costly, identifying effective strategies to reduce symptoms is a priority. This study tested whether adolescents could learn to use cognitive reappraisal strategies to attenuate fear during extinction learning. Fifty-seven participants (12–15 years) viewed images of two neutral faces, one which was paired with a fearful expression and shrieking scream (conditioned threat stimulus) and the other that was never paired with the aversive outcome (conditioned safety stimulus) during fear acquisition. Before extinction, participants either received cognitive appraisal training, which explored alternative, benign meanings associated with the scream or a control activity. Self-reported fear ratings in the cognitive reappraisal group were significantly lower to both the conditioned threat and safety stimuli after extinction than the control group. These findings did not characterise fear-potentiated startle data. Potential reasons for the lack of consistency between measures are considered.     

Reconsidering “Considering Gestational Life”: Reply to Commentaries by Levine and Williams

The two commentaries of “Considering Gestational Life” are both wonderful in their generative reflections and from such uniquely different perspectives. Each has generated an array of new questions about the nature and impact of gestation that are yet to be substantially explored. This discussion attempts to further their inquiries by focusing on how “gestational thinking” leads us into exploring Negative Capability; the improvisational nature of analytic process; objectivity versus subjectivity; reconsidering the impact of gestational trauma; the epistimophilic instinct; gender bias; clarifying “objectless intersubjectivity”; the role of silence, isolation, interiority, and privacy in analytic listening; what patients seek in treatment; and clarification of the meaning of “merger” and “unity.”     

To what degree do situational influences explain spontaneous helping behaviour? A meta-analysis

Prosocial behaviour is an interdisciplinary topic, involving psychologists, philosophers, and educators. Based on experimental helping research, some moral philosophers have claimed that helping behaviour is entirely situationally determined. The dominance of situational factor experimentation gives the appearance that situational factors alone can explain helping behaviour. This meta-analysis investigated situational explanations of helping behaviour with 286 effects and 46,705 participants from experimental studies with non-manipulation control groups, and observed unilateral adult behavioural helping. Results indicated expected group differences in helping behaviour frequency among help encouraging or help discouraging experimental conditions and no-manipulation control conditions. Helping behaviour was also frequent in help discouraging and control conditions and far from universal in help encouraging conditions. Because helping occurred in control groups, situational factors cannot explain all observed helping. Because helping was not universal in help encouraging conditions, it raises the question of individual differences in responsiveness to helping cues.     

Types of God Representations and Mental Health: A Person-Oriented Approach

As God representations are multi-facetted psychological processes regarding the personal meaning of God/the divine to the individual, this study examines how multiple aspects of God representations are configured within individuals belonging to a sample of psychiatric patients or a non-patient sample, and how these configurations are associated with mental health. By means of cluster analyses, three types of God representations were found: a Positive-Authoritative one, a Passive-Unemotional one, and, only among psychiatric patients, a Negative-Authoritarian one. Types of God representations were significantly related to affective state, as well as religious saliency and religious background. Patients with the negative type of God representation were more distressed and depressed, and Orthodox-Reformed patients reported significantly more negative types of God representations. This study demonstrates the value of a person-oriented approach, by showing that scale scores became especially meaningful in the context of the types, which enables more nuanced distinctions regarding subgroups.     

Children’s Attitudes toward Aggression: Associations with Depression,Aggression, and Perceived Maternal/Peer Responses to Anger

Little is known about factors that influence children’s attitudes toward aggression, despite evidence that these attitudes are influential in promoting violent behaviors. The purpose of the present research was to examine the relation of self, peer, and parent social factors to school-age children’s maladaptive attitudes toward aggression. Specifically, symptoms of depression, peer overt aggression behaviors, and perceptions of maternal and peer responses to anger were evaluated as important factors associated with the use of aggression. These factors were examined separately for boys and girls, as research has consistently documented gender differences in the form and use of aggression. Hierarchical regression models were computed separately for boys and girls in grades three through five (N?=?167), with child-reported depression, peer-nominated overt aggression, and child-reported maternal and best friend responses to anger examined as predictors of maladaptive attitudes toward aggression. For girls, depressive symptoms positively predicted maladaptive attitudes toward aggression. For boys, the extent of peer-reported overt aggression (positively) and child-reported supportive maternal responses to the child’s anger (negatively) predicted maladaptive attitudes toward aggression. The value of examining social factors that relate to attitudes toward aggression is discussed as well as consideration of gender differences in these relations. In addition, discussion includes how these results highlight important targets for interventions that may be especially relevant for school-age girls and boys.     

Paternal Psychiatric Symptoms and Maladaptive Paternal Behavior in the Home During the Child Rearing Years

Data from the Children in the Community Study, a community-based longitudinal study were used to investigate associations between paternal psychiatric disorders and child-rearing behaviors. Paternal psychiatric symptoms and behavior in the home were assessed among 782 families during the childhood and adolescence of the offspring. Paternal anxiety, disruptive, mood, personality, and substance use disorders were independently associated with specific types of maladaptive paternal behavior in the home during the child-rearing years after paternal age, education, income, co-occurring paternal psychiatric symptoms, offspring age, sex, intelligence, temperament, and psychiatric symptoms were controlled statistically. Paternal psychiatric disorders that were present by mean offspring age 14 were associated with elevated risk for maladaptive paternal behavior in the home at mean age offspring 16, after prior maladaptive paternal behavior was controlled statistically. These findings suggest that paternal psychiatric disorder may be an important determinant of maladaptive paternal behavior in the home during the child-rearing years. Improved recognition and treatment of paternal psychiatric disorders may help to reduce the amount of maladaptive parenting behavior that many children and adolescents might otherwise be likely to experience.     

Uses and misuses of habituation and related preference paradigms

Houston‐Price and Nakai raise an important problem researchers face when attempting to interpret infant visual preference data. This problem stems from paradigms in which infants are only partially familiarized to a stimulus, and it is unclear whether they should show a novelty or familiarity preference to that stimulus in a subsequent test. As Hunter and Ames' (1988) noted in their important chapter, infants will sometimes show a familiarity preference rather than a novelty preference, particularly when the infants are relatively young and the stimuli are relatively complex. In this commentary, I shall make three points regarding this issue: first, that the familiarity preference problem is real; second, that in most cases there is a simple solution to the problem; and third that certain popular infant paradigms can exacerbate the problem. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Natural-scene perception requires attention

Is visual attention required for visual consciousness? In the past decade, many researchers have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention. This claim is largely based on the notion that natural scene (or "gist") perception occurs without attention. This article presents evidence against this idea. We show that when observers perform a variety of demanding, sustained-attention tasks, inattentional blindness occurs for natural scenes. In addition, scene perception is impaired under dual-task conditions, but only when the primary task is sufficiently demanding. This finding suggests that previous studies that have been interpreted as demonstrating scene perception without attention failed to fully engage attention and that natural-scene perception does indeed require attention. Thus, natural-scene perception is not a preattentive process and cannot be used to support the idea of awareness without attention.