Occupational Therapists' Perception of the Tree Theme Method™ as an Intervention in Psychosocial Occupational Therapy

This study investigated how occupational therapists experience utilization of the Tree Theme Method, an intervention based on creative activities and life-story telling and making. The Tree Theme Method is comprised of five sessions in which the therapist asks the client to paint symbolic trees, with specific themes representing their present life situation, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and the future. Nine occupational therapists in mental health care were asked about their experiences when using the Tree Theme Method. The informants formed two focus groups and each group was interviewed twice. Qualitative content analysis was used to identify five categories including: (1) therapeutic frames, (2) therapist requirements, (3) client requirements, (4) the therapeutic relationship, and (5) the Tree Theme Method as a multi-dimensional process. Overall the informants were satisfied with the intervention with some variation as to therapists' perception about the helpfulness of the tool. The Tree Theme Method was experienced as a structured method of starting a therapeutic process and initiating a therapist–client relationship. The therapeutic attitude, self-knowledge, and expert knowledge seemed to be important prerequisites for the therapists when using the Tree Theme Method intervention.     

Psychometric evaluation and further validation of the Hagedoorn et al. modified EVLN measure

The aim of the present study was to evaluate and further validate a modified Exit, Voice, Loyalty and Neglect (EVLN) instrument (Hagedoorn, Van Yperen, Van de Vliert & Buunk, 1999), in a Swedish sample (n= 792). To test the underlying scaling assumptions, the convergent and divergent validity, a multitrait/multi-item analysis was conducted and factor analyses were used to evaluate the factor structure. The concurrent validity was tested by using the modified EVLN instrument as predictor and three different forms of justice as criteria in the analysis. The criterion-related validity was tested and an association between exit behavioral response and actual exit behavior was found (predictive validity). The results showed that the instrument may be considered to be a valid measure with the exception of the aggressive voice scale.     

Ego involvement moderates the assimilation effect of affective expectations

Based on the affective expectations model and research on mental effort mobilization, two experiments manipulated affective expectations (no expectations versus positive expectations) and ego involvement (low versus high) and assessed participants’ affective reactions to hedonically neutral stimuli. In Experiment 1, evaluations were more positive when participants had positive expectations about neutral photos—but only when ego involvement was low. High ego involvement neutralized this affective expectation assimilation effect. Experiment 2 replicated these findings for experienced mood after reading a hedonically neutral short essay. Furthermore, high ego involvement led to longer response latencies in the affect ratings in Study 1. The findings support the idea that high ego involvement resulted in relatively high mental effort that was necessary to detect discrepancies between affective expectations and stimuli’s real affective potential and therefore moderated the assimilation effect to affective expectations.

Is task switching nothing but cue priming? Evidence from ERPs

Recent findings suggesting that switch costs in the task-cuing paradigm are largely attributable to a change in the task-indicating cue have been interpreted in terms of a priming model of task-switch costs (Logan & Bundesen, 2003). According to this explanation, participants do not actually switch task sets, but merely use a cue-stimulus compound to disambiguate competing response tendencies associated with bivalent stimuli. Here, we report an event-related potential (ERP) experiment that provides evidence against this notion. In a paradigm with a 2:1 mapping between cues and tasks, we show that cue-switch and task-switch effects are dissociable on a neurophysiological level, indicating that task switching is more than a switch in the task-indicating cue. Moreover, a systematic analysis of the ERPs during the cue-stimulus interval suggests that updating processes can run in advance, before the stimulus is presented.     

Comparison of different strategies to decrease negative affect and increase positive affect in women with borderline personality disorder

Background

In this study we compared the effect of different emotion regulation strategies on positive and negative emotions in patients with borderline personality disorder.

Methods

Emotion regulation strategies were a distracting task, individual positive memory imagery, individual soothing imagery, and a neutral comparison condition. During two separate sessions, 17 participants watched either neutral or negative movie segments before using these strategies.

Results

All three strategies influenced emotions into a favorable direction as compared to the neutral comparison condition. The positive memory image increased positive emotions significantly stronger than counting colors and distracting.

Discussion

Different strategies seem to have similar effects in decreasing negative emotions. Positive emotions may be affected in particular by positive and soothing imagery techniques.     

Infants' emerging ability to represent occluded object motion

The emerging ability to represent an oscillating moving object over occlusions was studied in 7-21-week-old infants. The object moved at 0.25 Hz and was either occluded at the center of the trajectory (for 0.3 s) or at one turning point (for 0.7 s). Each trial lasted for 20 s. Both eye and head movements were measured. By using two kinds of motion, sinusoidal (varying velocity) and triangular (constant velocity), infants' ability to take velocity change into account when predicting the reappearance of the moving object was tested. Over the age period studied, performance at the central occluder progressed from almost total ignorance of what happened to consistent predictive behavior. From around 12 weeks of age, infants began to form representations of the moving object that persisted over temporary occlusions. At around 5 months of age these representations began to incorporate the dynamics of the represented motion. Strong learning effects were obtained over single trials, but there was no evidence of retention between trials. The individual differences were profound.     

Anhedonic symptoms of depression are linked to reduced motivation to obtain a reward

People with depression report reduced motivation to obtain a reward and reduced affective responses to reward. However, studies focusing on the relation between anhedonia and deficits in reward processing are scarce. Furthermore, studies investigating wanting through cardiovascular reactivity and liking through facial electromyography in human beings are also scarce. In this study, we used the Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale score as a continuous predictor variable of anhedonia and we manipulated two within-person conditions (wanting vs. liking). Participants earned money if their performance on a memory task exceeded a particular standard. As expected, effort-related cardiovascular reactivity and self-reports during the anticipatory phase were lower for participants scoring high on anhedonia. Moreover, task performance outcomes were worse for highly anhedonic participants. However, the zygomaticus major muscle’s activity during the consummatory phase was unrelated to the anhedonia score. The present study underlines the importance of anhedonic symptoms, particularly in reduced anticipatory motivation to obtain a reward.     

Language access and theory of mind reasoning: evidence from deaf children in bilingual and oralist environments

This investigation examined whether access to sign language as a medium for instruction influences theory of mind (ToM) reasoning in deaf children with similar home language environments. Experiment 1 involved 97 deaf Italian children ages 4-12 years: 56 were from deaf families and had LIS (Italian Sign Language) as their native language, and 41 had acquired LIS as late signers following contact with signers outside their hearing families. Children receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction in LIS together with Sign-Supported and spoken Italian significantly outperformed children in oralist schools in which communication was in Italian and often relied on lipreading. Experiment 2 involved 61 deaf children in Estonia and Sweden ages 6-16 years. On a wide variety of ToM tasks, bilingually instructed native signers in Estonian Sign Language and spoken Estonian succeeded at a level similar to age-matched hearing children. They outperformed bilingually instructed late signers and native signers attending oralist schools. Particularly for native signers, access to sign language in a bilingual environment may facilitate conversational exchanges that promote the expression of ToM by enabling children to monitor others' mental states effectively.     

Differential effects of social and non‐social reward on response inhibition in children and adolescents

An important issue in the field of clinical and developmental psychopathology is whether cognitive control processes, such as response inhibition, can be specifically enhanced by motivation. To determine whether non‐social (i.e. monetary) and social (i.e. positive facial expressions) rewards are able to differentially improve response inhibition accuracy in typically developing children and adolescents, an ‘incentive’ go/no‐go task was applied with reward contingencies for successful inhibition. In addition, the impact of children's personality traits (such as reward seeking and empathy) on monetary and social reward responsiveness was assessed in 65 boys, ages 8 to 12 years. All subjects were tested twice: At baseline, inhibitory control was assessed without reward, and then subjects were pseudorandomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, including (1) social reward only, (2) monetary reward only, (3) mixed social and monetary reward, or (4) a retest condition without reward. Both social and non‐social reward significantly improved task performance, although larger effects were observed for monetary reward. The higher the children scored on reward seeking scales, the larger was their improvement in response inhibition, but only if monetary reward was used. In addition, there was a tendency for an association between empathic skills and benefits from social reward. These data suggest that social incentives do not have an equally strong reinforcing value as compared to financial incentives. However, different personality traits seem to determine to what extent a child profits from different types of reward. Clinical implications regarding probable hyposensitivity to social reward in subjects with autism and dysregulated reward‐seeking behaviour in children with attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are discussed.     

The effects of implicit attentional learning and habituation on inhibition of return

In two experiments, the effects of implicit attentional learning and habituation on inhibition of return (IOR) were assessed. Experiment 1 consisted of an informative variant of the spatial cuing paradigm (Posner, 1980), with the target appearing most often at the location next to the cue. Short-term as well as long-term learning of the regularities could be observed. This learning took place even though the participants were not able to verbalize the learned information, suggesting that the learning was implicit. By spatially separating the effects of implicit learning and IOR, we demonstrated that the magnitude of IOR slightly decreased because of long-term implicit orienting. In Experiment 2, a noninformative variant of the spatial cuing paradigm, IOR was still found to decrease over the course of the experiment. This suggests that habituation due to the mere repeated initiation of IOR also affects the magnitude of the IOR. This theory is supported by the finding that IOR recovered after short breaks in Experiment 2. However, habituation presumably only played a secondary role in Experiment 1. In sum, IOR was abolished by neither implicit attentional learning nor habituation. Here, the finding that IOR is not easily replaced by implicitly learned orienting clearly indicates that IOR is a powerful, low-level mechanism. We discuss implications of these results for the debate on the function of IOR.