Soft Prosody and Embodied Attunement in Therapeutic Interaction: A Multimethod Case Study of a Moment of Change

This study focused on a moment of weeping in one psychotherapy case. The overall aim was to explore the role of “soft prosody” in psychotherapy interaction—that is, the participants’ use of pauses, a lower volume, slower rhythms, and softer intonation than in the surrounding speech. A mixed-method, micro-analytic perspective was applied to investigate (a) social interaction, including its verbal and nonverbal elements; (2) the participants’ bodily responses, including autonomic nervous system (ANS) measurements; and (3) the participants’ thoughts and feelings during the therapy session, as reported in subsequent individual interviews. Soft prosody was observed to be an important conversational tool. It was used in conveying affiliation and offering therapeutic formulations, and it appeared to contribute both to emotional attunement between the participants and to the therapeutic change that occurred during the interaction under study. Two differing bodily synchronization tendencies in the arousal levels were observed among the participants: (a) a complementary tendency—that is, when the client's arousal increased, the therapist's decreased (occurring during the active therapeutic processing); and (b) a tendency to concurrent decreased arousal in all of the participants.     

Judgment of other people's facial expressions of emotions is influenced by their concurrent affective hand movements

We investigated whether emotional information from facial expression and hand movement quality was integrated when identifying the expression of a compound stimulus showing a static facial expression combined with emotionally expressive dynamic manual actions. The emotions (happiness, neutrality, and anger) expressed by the face and hands were either congruent or incongruent. In Experiment 1, the participants judged whether the stimulus person was happy, neutral, or angry. Judgments were mainly based on the facial expressions, but were affected by manual expressions to some extent. In Experiment 2, the participants were instructed to base their judgment on the facial expression only. An effect of hand movement expressive quality was observed for happy facial expressions. The results conform with the proposal that perception of facial expressions of emotions can be affected by the expressive qualities of hand movements.     

Effects of the School-to-Work Group Method among young people

This study examines effects of the School-to-Work Group Method among 17-25-year-old young people facing the transition from vocational college to work. After baseline measurement (N = 416) participants were randomized into experimental and control groups. The results of ten month follow-up (N = 334) showed notable beneficial impacts of the group method on both employment itself and on how well it matched participants’ education and personal career plans. The group method also had a significant preventive effect on psychological distress and depression symptoms among those initially at risk of suffering from mental disorder. Moreover, it considerably increased participants’ personal work life, finances and property goals.     

Change‐oriented organizational citizenship behaviour: An interactive product of openness to change values,work unit identification,and sense of power

Due to the increased frequency of organizational changes, predicting employees’ voluntary involvement in the development of organizational practices and individual work is of particular importance in organizational psychology. This study focused upon change‐oriented organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) as an expression of openness to change values, and also upon psychological factors that can moderate the value–behaviour relationship. We propose that personal values, group identification, and a sense of power interact in predicting change‐oriented OCB of employees. One hundred and eighty‐four employees rated their values, their identification with the work unit and their sense of power. In line with our predictions, the results showed that openness to change values and work unit identification interacted positively in predicting supervisor‐rated change‐oriented OCB in workers with a high sense of power, but not in workers with a low sense of power. This finding suggests that workers who have a high sense of power and are highly identified with the work unit tend to pursue their openness to change values in a way that contributes to the organization. The authors further conclude that an interactive approach, rather than one of direct effect, is advantageous when studying values as antecedents to change‐oriented OCB.     

Cluster C personality disorder and recovery from major depression: 24-month prospective follow-up

We investigated whether Cluster C personality disorder (CPD) is associated with recovery from depression. Changes in symptom scales in 30 patients with MD and CPD were compared with changes in 60 patients with MD alone over a 24-month follow-up period. Recovery of patients with MD and comorbid CPD was inferior to recovery of those with MD alone based on the Hamilton and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scales, and the SCL-90 total score. Only 18% of those with MD alone but 47% of those with CPD and MD met the criteria for major depression at the end of the 24-month follow-up. Multiple logistic regression analyses revealed an independent association between the lack of recovery (BDI score > 9 at 24 months) and the presence of CPD (OR 4.9, 95% CI 1.5-16.0). Moreover, the presence of CPD associated with the presence of major depression at 24 months (OR 4.2, 95% CI 1.4-12.2). The presence of CPD hinders the alleviation of depressive symptoms in major depression.     

Affect and face perception: odors modulate the recognition advantage of happy faces

Previous choice reaction time studies have provided consistent evidence for faster recognition of positive (e.g., happy) than negative (e.g., disgusted) facial expressions. A predominance of positive emotions in normal contexts may partly explain this effect. The present study used pleasant and unpleasant odors to test whether emotional context affects the happy face advantage. Results from 2 experiments indicated that happiness was recognized faster than disgust in a pleasant context, but this advantage disappeared in an unpleasant context because of the slow recognition of happy faces. Odors may modulate the functioning of those emotion-related brain structures that participate in the formation of the perceptual representations of the facial expressions and in the generation of the conceptual knowledge associated with the signaled emotion.     

Estrogen treatment alleviates NMDA-antagonist induced hippocampal LTP blockade and cognitive deficits in ovariectomized mice

Estrogen is implicated in hippocampus-dependent spatial learning as well as structural organization and electrophysiological properties of the rat hippocampus but little is known about its mechanisms of action in mice. In this study, we investigated pharmacologically whether estrogen interacts with the hippocampal N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in ovariectomized mice as postulated for rats. Female C57BL/6J mice were ovariectomized at 5 months, and 2 weeks before testing at 12 months, half of them received subcutaneous estrogen pellets containing 0.18 mg of 17 beta-estradiol. The competitive NMDA-antagonist, 3-((+/-)-2-carboxypiperazin-4-yl)-propyl-1-phosphonic acid (CPP), was administered at 5.0 and 10.0 microM to block induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampal slice and intraperitoneally at 0.5, 2.0, and 5.0 mg/kg to impair spatial learning in the water maze. Estrogen treatment shifted the dose-response curve to CPP in both experiments. First, 10 microM CPP blocked the initiation of LTP in all mice, but 5 microM only in ovariectomized non-estrogen-treated mice. Second, final level of acquisition and probe trial performance in the water maze were less affected by high doses of CPP in the estrogen-treated ovariectomized mice than in non-treated group. In control tests for motor side effects, estrogen treatment did not reduce the tendency of CPP to decrease locomotor activity in the open field and impair balance on a rotating rod, and estrogen by itself decreased swimming speed as did CPP, but these effects did not interact. Our findings support the notion that estrogen treatment increases the number of active NMDA-receptors in the mouse hippocampus.     

Controlling reactive aggression through cognitive evaluation of proactive aggression cues

The authors investigated how the relationship between the acts of proactive and reactive aggression was moderated by the individual differences in cognitive regulation of emotion. An aggression paradigm, a electrocardiogram recording, a cognitive assessment battery, and a short form IQ test were completed by 109 children, aged 8 to 13 years (Juujärvi, Kaartinen, Laitinen, Vanninen, & Pulkkinen, 2006 Juujärvi, P., Kaartinen, J., Laitinen, T., Vanninen, E. and Pulkkinen, L. 2006. Effects of physical provocations on heart rate reactivity, and reactive aggression in children. Aggressive Behavior, 32: 99–109. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Juujärvi, Kooistra, Kaartinen, & Pulkkinen, 2001 Juujärvi, P., Kooistra, L., Kaartinen, J. and Pulkkinen, L. 2001. An aggression machine: V. Determinants of reactive aggression revisited. Aggressive Behavior, 27: 430–445. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Lehto, Juujärvi, Kooistra, & Pulkkinen, 2003 Lehto, J. E., Juujärvi, P., Kooistra, L. and Pulkkinen, L. 2003. Dimensions of executive functioning: Evidence from children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 21: 59–80. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The less the children subdued the intensity of their defence to the attacks in the aggression paradigm, the poorer they performed in the cognitive assessment battery tasks measuring Working memory capacity and in the task assessing crystallised intelligence. The mean cardiovascular reactivity during the aggression paradigm was neither associated with the performances in either the cognitive assessment battery nor the intelligence tasks. Both information processing and knowledge dimensions of cognition contributed to regulation of emotion, but the respective effects of the processes cannot be inferred from the mean cardiovascular reactivity.