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.     

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.     

Is there more in a happy face than just a big smile?

Happy faces involve appearance changes in the mouth (the smile) and eye region (e.g., narrowing of the eye opening). The present experiments investigated whether the recognition of happy faces is achieved on the basis of the smile alone or whether information in the eye region is also used. A go/no-go task was used in which participants responded to happy faces and withhold a response to nonhappy distractors. The presence/absence of the expressive cues in the eyes did not affect recognition accuracy but reaction times were slightly longer for smiles without expressive cues in the eyes. This delay was not obtained when the top and the bottom halves of the faces were misaligned, or when the distractor was changed from a top-dominant to a bottom-dominant facial expression (i.e., from anger to disgust). Together, these results suggest that the eyes may have a modest effect on speeded recognition of happy faces although the presence of this effect may depend on task context.     

An advanced specialist-level training programme in psychodynamic individual psychotherapy of psychotic and borderline patients: the Finnish approach

Most training programmes in individual psychotherapy, including psychoanalytic training are, in practice, restricted to the treatmentof lessdisturbed patients than those who have succumbed to psychotic or severely borderline-level disorders. This has had a delaying effect on the development of psychotherapy with such patients. Psychotherapy of severely disturbed patients is usually regarded as a difficult domain and is often practised only by psychoanalysts or other psychotherapists specially dedicated to working with patients of this kind. Between 1994 and 1997, an advanced multi-professional training programme in psychodynamic individual therapy with an emphasis on borderline and psychotic-level disorders was organized through the Centre for Extension Studies of the University of Turku, Finland, to close the gap in systematic training for the treatment of the most serious psychic disorders, and also to integrate some of the special requirements of public and private psychiatric health care. Here we briefly describe the main elements of our training programme as well as some of our training experiences. It is important to emphasize that the training was not meant to replace psychoanalytic training. It is a question of a separate multi-professional programme based on psychoanalytic premises but with particular objectives of its own.