A Trust-Based Home Intervention for Special-Needs Adopted Children: A Case Study

Research on the effects of abuse, neglect, and other traumas in early childhood has consistently demonstrated severe deficits that can be prevalent across the life span. Costs associated with addressing such deficits in special-needs children can strain families and are an immense financial burden to society. Trust-Based Relational Intervention® is an intervention modality that targets the attachment system as part of a dynamic system of development. Presented is a summary of the costs of addressing the sequelae of childhood abuse and neglect, a brief overview of Trust-Based Relational Intervention, and a case study demonstrating the efficacy of this intervention with an adopted special-needs child in a home-based setting.     

Perceptions of Younger Single Adults as a Function of Their Gender and Number of Children

ABSTRACT. Research suggests that children may interfere with single parents’ romantic experiences. Although both male and female single parents face these challenges, they have stronger associations with the romantic satisfaction of single mothers as compared to single fathers. The two current studies examined aspects of attractiveness and dating across various dimensions for both younger single women and men, with and without children. Results of Study 1 indicated interactive effects of target gender and parental status on perceptions of both attractiveness and dating potential. Results of Study 2 indicated differential ratings on multiple dimensions (i.e., attractiveness, stress, motivation for dating, and positive qualities) of younger single adults on the basis of gender, parental status, and the number of children single parents were reported as having. Implications for importance of social support and difficulty of repartnering are discussed.     

Monitoring the Opinion of the Crowd: Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Public Opinion Perceptions on Social Media

Social media technologies offer several features that allow users to monitor other people’s opinions on public issues. Initial research showed that user-generated content can shape recipients’ perceptions of the majority opinion on societal problems. Still, it remains largely unexplored under which circumstances people gauge other users’ opinions through social media and whether perceived opinion climates affect people’s opinions and communication behavior in these environments. Results of a two-session experiment revealed that people’s fear of isolation sharpens their attention toward user-generated comments on Facebook which, in turn, affect recipients’ public opinion perceptions. The latter influenced subjects’ opinions and their willingness to participate in social media discussions. These findings are discussed in light of the spiral of silence theory and the social projection hypothesis.     

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom‐up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top‐down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi‐gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.     

Facilitation of Extinction of Conditioned Fear by D-Cycloserine

Abstract— Excessive fear and anxiety are characteristic of disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and phobias and are believed to reflect abnormalities in neural systems governing the development and reduction of conditioned fear. Conditioned fear can be suppressed through a process known as extinction, in which repeated exposure to a feared stimulus in the absence of an aversive event leads to a gradual reduction in the fear response to that stimulus. Like conditioned fear learning, extinction is dependent on a particular protein (the N-methyl-D-aspartate or NMDA receptor) in a part of the brain called the amygdala. Blockade of this receptor blocks extinction and improving the activity of this receptor with a drug called D-cycloserine speeds up extinction in rats. Because exposure-based psychotherapy for fear disorders in humans resembles extinction in several respects, we investigated whether D-cycloserine might facilitate the loss of fear in human patients. Consistent with findings from the animal laboratory, patients receiving D-cycloserine benefited more from exposure-based psychotherapy than did placebo-treated controls. Although very preliminary, these data provide initial support for the use of cognitive enhancers in psychotherapy and demonstrate that preclinical studies in rodents can have direct benefits to humans.     

Treating sleep disturbance in infants: What generalizes?

When treating infant sleep problems implementing treatment procedures at bedtime‐only might be easier and more efficient than requiring parents to implement procedures throughout the night, but only if improvements at bedtime generalize to later in the night. This study investigated the immediate and generalized effect of treating bedtime settling problems and later night waking in infants and whether it was parent or child behavior that generalized. Parents recorded sleep problems of seven infants (6–20 months) who exhibited chronic sleep disturbance, then implemented a graduated checking procedure at bedtime‐only (Setting 1). A multiple‐baseline across‐settings and participants design was employed. Immediate (in Setting 1) and any generalized effects (in Setting 2) on wakings and other changes in parent and child behavior were assessed by diary information and all‐night infra‐red video recordings. Clinically significant reductions in sleep problems were evident for five out of seven infants, but these were not consistently observed until parents generalized their use of the procedure throughout the night. There was no evidence that the infants generalized changes in self‐soothing from bedtime to later. It is concluded that changes in infant sleep problems are unlikely to occur unless parents actually alter their management of the problems across all settings in which the problems occur. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of acute 17beta-estradiol treatment on gene expression in the young female mouse hippocampus

Previous studies have demonstrated that treatment with 17beta-estradiol (E(2)) improves both spatial and nonspatial memory in young female mice. Still unclear, however, are the molecular mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of E(2) on memory. We have previously demonstrated that a single post-training intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of 0.2 mg/kg E(2) can enhance hippocampal-dependent spatial and object memory consolidation (e.g., Gresack & Frick, 2006b). Therefore, in the present study, we performed a microarray analysis on the dorsal hippocampi of 4-month-old female mice injected i.p. with vehicle or 0.2 mg/kg E(2). Genes were considered differentially expressed following E(2) treatment if they showed a greater than 2-fold change in RNA expression levels compared to controls. Overall, out of a total of approximately 25,000 genes represented on the array, 204 genes showed altered mRNA expression levels upon E(2) treatment, with 111 up-regulated and 93 down-regulated. Of these, 17 of the up-regulated and 6 of the down-regulated genes are known to be involved in learning and memory. mRNA expression changes in 5 of the genes were confirmed by real-time quantitative PCR analysis, and protein changes in these same genes were confirmed by Western blot analysis: Hsp70, a heat shock protein known to be estrogen responsive; Igfbp2, an IGF-I binding protein; Actn4, an actin binding protein involved in protein trafficking; Tubb2a, the major component of microtubules; and Snap25, a synaptosome-specific protein required for neurotransmitter release. The types of genes altered indicate that E(2) may induce changes in the structural mechanics of cells within the dorsal hippocampus that could be conducive to promoting memory consolidation.     

A critical review of a recent decade of stuttering research

The purpose of the present investigation was to catalogue and evaluate portions of the literature on stuttering from 1967 to 1977. Of particular interest was the identification of the research literature. Of 287 articles located and evaluated, 181 were research reports. These reports were categorized according to topics, subject selection, subjects' characteristics, type of research designs and use of randomization, reliability, and statistical methods. Unhappily, many of the faults identified in reviews ten to twenty years earlier tended to persist, and many of the deficiencies recently cited by authorities in the field were found to characterize this literature.     

Conditioned fear extinction and reinstatement in a human fear-potentiated startle paradigm

The purpose of this study was to analyze fear extinction and reinstatement in humans using fear-potentiated startle. Participants were fear conditioned using a simple discrimination procedure with colored lights as the conditioned stimuli (CSs) and an airblast to the throat as the unconditioned stimulus (US). Participants were extinguished 24 h after fear conditioning. Upon presentation of unsignaled USs after extinction, participants displayed significant fear reinstatement. In summary, these procedures produced robust fear-potentiated startle, significant CS+/CS- discrimination, within-session extinction, and significant reinstatement. This is the first demonstration of fear extinction and reinstatement in humans using startle measures.