Familienfunktionalität und Therapieerfolg

Background

Even though it is a treatment standard of child psychotherapy to involve the parents, hardly any research has been carried out about the impact of family functioning on treatment outcome. Aims of the present study were to investigate the change in and the prognostic power of family functioning on treatment outcome of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy in children and adolescents.

Patients and methods

The sample consisted of 54 children and adolescents undergoing outpatient short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy. To assess family functioning, their parents were asked to complete the Family Assessment Measure (FAM).

Results

Patients from families with high levels of functioning in task accomplishment, communication and affective expression were more often treated successfully. Improvement in levels of functioning in role performance, emotionality and control were only found in the group of successfully treated patients.

Conclusion

Family functioning is a decisive factor in the differential indication of psychotherapeutic treatment in children and adolescents.     

Effect of shared information and owner behavior on showing in dogs (Canis familiaris)

Animal Cognition - Dogs’ production of referential communicative signals, i.e., showing, has gained increasing scientific interest over the last years. In this paper, we investigate whether...     

Assessment of substance abusers on the MCMI-III and the Rorschach

We examined 60 substance abusers (SA) on the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III (MCMI-III; Millon, 1994) and on eight Rorschach variables from the Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 2003). On the MCMI-III, SA scored above the cutoff for clinical significance (M > or = BR 70) on Drug Dependence (94.77), Antisocial (82.95), Depressive (74.33), Self-Defeating (71.48), and Alcohol Dependence (70.70). On seven of the CS variables (M+,o,u, XA%, X-%, WSum6Lv2%, M-%, SumT%, and Pure H%) the scores of the SAs suggested significant more psychopathology compared to the scores of 60 university students, whereas the SA's scores on six of these variables (M+,o,u, XA%, X-%, WSum6Lv2%, SumT%, and Pure H%) suggested significantly less psychopathology compared to the scores of 36 schizophrenics. The effect sizes for the significant differences were in the small, medium and large range (d= 0.31 to d= 1.87).     

Neuroendocrine stress responses to an oral academic examination: No strong influence of sex, repeated participation and personality traits

Public speaking tasks have been widely used as laboratory stressors in human research. Fewer studies have investigated similar real life situations like oral examinations and results have been inconsistent. The present study investigated salivary cortisol (as a marker of hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity) and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA as a marker of sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity) within the context of a university examination. Subjects were 40 undergraduate students who participated in an oral examination. Of these, 20 also participated in a second examination within a few weeks. Cortisol and sAA were measured immediately before and after the examination and on a control day. Additionally, subjects filled out personality questionnaires. A strong anticipatory increase in salivary cortisol and sAA as well as more modest further increases between the pre- and post-measurements were detected during the examination. Sex or oral contraceptive use had no influence on either measure. In addition, no significant differences between the first and second examination were observed. The findings indicate the neuroendocrine stress responses to laboratory stressors and to heralded real life stressors as well as the modulatory variables involved differ from each other.     

Masked emotional priming beyond global valence activations

An immense body of research demonstrates that emotional facial expressions can be processed unconsciously. However, it has been assumed that such processing takes place solely on a global valence-based level, allowing individuals to disentangle positive from negative emotions but not the specific emotion. In three studies, we investigated the specificity of emotion processing under conditions of limited awareness using a modified variant of an affective priming task. Faces with happy, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral expressions were presented as masked primes for 33 ms (Study 1) or 14 ms (Studies 2 and 3) followed by emotional target faces (Studies 1 and 2) or emotional adjectives (Study 3). Participants' task was to categorise the target emotion. In all three studies, discrimination of targets was significantly affected by the emotional primes beyond a simple positive versus negative distinction. Results indicate that specific aspects of emotions might be automatically disentangled in addition to valence, even under conditions of subjective unawareness.     

Time in the eye of the beholder: Gaze position reveals spatial-temporal associations during encoding and memory retrieval of future and past

Time is grounded in various ways, and previous studies point to a “mental time line” with past associated with the left, and future with the right side. In this study, we investigated whether spontaneous eye movements on a blank screen would follow a mental timeline during encoding, free recall, and recognition of past and future items. In all three stages of processing, gaze position was more rightward during future items compared to past items. Moreover, horizontal gaze position during encoding predicted horizontal gaze position during free recall and recognition. We conclude that mental time line and the stored gaze position during encoding assist memory retrieval of past versus future items. Our findings highlight the spatial nature of temporal representations.     

MINIMIZING THE PERVASIVENESS OF WOMEN'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF GENDER DISCRIMINATION

Given the Rejection-Identification Model ( Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999 ), which shows that perceiving discrimination to be pervasive is a negative experience, it was suggested that there would be conditions under which women would instead minimize the pervasiveness of discrimination. Study 1 ( N = 91) showed that when women envisioned themselves in a situation of academic discrimination, they defined it as pervasive, but when they experienced a similar laboratory simulation of academic discrimination, its pervasiveness was minimized. Study 2 ( N = 159) showed that women who envisioned themselves experiencing discrimination minimized its pervasiveness more so than women reading about discrimination happening to someone else. Further, mediation analysis showed that minimizing the pervasiveness enhanced positive affect about personal discrimination. Implications for minimizing on both an individual and social level are discussed.     

Just a Game? Unjustified Virtual Violence Produces Guilt in Empathetic Players

Many avid gamers discount violent conduct in video games as morally insignificant as “it is just a game.” However, recent debates among users, regarding video games featuring inappropriate forms of virtual violence, suggest a more complex truth. Two experiments (N₁ = 49, N₂ = 80) examined users' guilt responses in order to explore the moral significance of virtual violence. In both studies, justification of virtual violence and users' trait empathy determined guilt in a structurally similar way to real-world scenarios: People felt guiltier if they engaged in unjustified virtual violence, especially if they were empathetic players. These results show that video games are capable of inducing affective moral responses in users. Accordingly, virtual violence may be considered morally significant action.     

Internalization of the therapeutic process: differences between borderline and neurotic patients

Intersession process in psychotherapy refers to the thoughts, memories, and feelings about each other and about their therapy sessions that participants experience during the intervals between sessions. This study compared the intersession process experienced by patients who had been diagnosed with severe borderline personality disorders (BPD) with others who had not. A total of 76 patients with neurotic disturbances and 20 patients with BPD were treated in a therapeutic day clinic and completed the Intersession Experience Questionnaire (IEQ) before sessions of individual psychotherapy and the Session Questionnaire (Stundenbogen) after those sessions. Comparison of the two groups on these measures of intersession process and postsession outcome showed markedly different patterns in patients' evaluations and internalizations of in-session therapeutic experiences: most prominently, that BPD patients internalize therapy sessions with much more negative and contradictory emotions.