Change during and after long-term analytic group psychotherapy

There are very few empirical studies of long-term, analytic group psychotherapy. Sixty-nine patients in long-term analytic group psychotherapy were evaluated from pretherapy to posttherapy, and one year after termination. The primary outcome measures were the Symptom Checklist-90 (Revised) and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems. In addition, the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) was scored independently by two evaluators. The average time in treatment was 32.5 months. The patients improved significantly during treatment, up to 30 months, on all measures. The improvement continued during the follow-up period. Sixty to 86% of the patients were recovered or significantly changed at follow-up.     

Intervening factors in the utilization of social research

In Swedish welfare agencies, it was found that the importance of characteristics of social research for utilization was related to three intervening factors: the context of origin of the research, the functions for the user and the utilization context. These factors seem to explain the difference between competing notions on the importance of scientific sophistication for research utilization. Sune Sunesson is professor and head of the Ph.D. program and the research department of the School of Social Work at Lund University. His main research interests are the sociology of human service organizations and the impact of science on these organizations. Kjell Nilsson, Birgitta Ericson, and Britt-Marie Johansson are Ph.D. candidates in the Department of Sociology of the Lund University.     

Emotional modulation of attention orienting: A classical conditioning study

Emotional modulation of attention shifting was investigated in Posner's (1980) spatial orienting task by conditioning the attention cue to an aversive white noise. Prior to the attention task, the Conditioning group received a 90dB white noise unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingent upon the frame-lit rectangle attention cue, while the Control group received non-contingent presentations. The Conditioning group evidenced greater skin conductance responses to the frame-lit rectangle in the conditioning phase, reflecting an electrodermal conditioned response. In the attention phase, the frame-lit rectangle served as the attention cue in the spatial orienting task. The Conditioning group showed equally fast reaction times (RTs) to targets presented outside the location of the cue as to targets at the same location as the cue, reflecting elimination of the cognitive cost usually involved in shifting attention. The Control group evidenced the regular cost of shifting attention away from the location of the cue. The Conditioning group also evidenced a larger N1-component with a parietal distribution of the event-related brain potentials to the cue and a larger N1-component at the frontal regions to targets presented outside the cued location. This suggests that both visual orienting to the cue and attention shifting from cue to target on invalid trials were amplified by the emotional salience attached to the cue through the classical conditioning procedure.     

Gender and Grade Differences in Latent Ability Variables

Scores in ability tests administered to students in grades 4–9 were simultaneously factor-analyzed within twelve gender by grade groups. Gender and grade differences in means and variances were studied for five latent ability factors according to a hierarchical model and compared with means and variances in the observed scores.
Girls had higher means than boys in a general ability factor (G), in a residual general speed factor (Gs') and in a residual factor of numerical facility (N'). Boys were higher in a residual vocabulary factor (V') and most of all in a residual spatial visualization factor (Vz'). Boys had larger variances than girls in N' and Gs'. In general the differences in means and variances were in the same direction for the closest corresponding observed scores, but some striking discrepancies between latent and observed scores were found. As a rule, the discrepancies were due to the complexity of the tests where one factor could compensate for another.
In the discussion it was pointed out that some of the differences found were likely to have changed between the testing in the late 1950s and the present. Nevertheless the demonstration of the divergence between analyses of latent vs. observed scores remains valid.     

PROBLEM SOLVING AND THE AWARENESS OF THE MISSING PART

R aaheim , K. Problem solving and the awareness of the missing part. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1962, 3 , 129–131.—When university students were asked to solve the so-called Pea Problem, with the added instruction of first looking for the missing instrumental part, solutions were not more frequent than without this addition, although the latter may have led to a greater awareness of the reason for choosing the correct line of attack.     

Skin conductance and heart‐rate responses as indices of covert face recognition in preschool children

Covert face recognition was examined in 12 young preschoolers (age range 26–48 months) by comparing their autonomic functions to slides depicting former playmates from a family nursery school that the preschoolers had attended earlier with slides of their present playmates and unfamiliar children. While all preschoolers reported corroborated overt recognition of present playmates after the experiment, only three of them did so in relation to former playmates. The distribution of yes–no responses on the overt recognition task to former playmates was not significantly different from the responses to unfamiliar children. Nevertheless, the preschoolers evidenced increased skin conductance responses (SCRs) and more pronounced heart rate (HR) deceleration to the slides depicting former classmates compared to unfamiliar children. Thus, although the preschoolers' verbal responses did not differentiate between former playmates and unfamiliar children, their autonomic functions did. These findings suggest that young children can retain memories of past experiences in an implicit form without corroborated overt recognition. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning outcomes in leadership teams: The multilevel dynamics of mastery goal orientation,team psychological safety,and team potency

A sample of 166 individual participants in 47 school leadership teams was used to investigate the multilevel relationships between individual learning outcomes and two dimensions of individual mastery achievement goal orientation—mastery approach goals (MAP), and an emotionally modified measure of mastery avoidance goals (MAV)—and two group-level emergent beliefs, namely, team potency and team psychological safety. All variables were independently positively related to individual learning; however, team potency had no incremental effect above team psychological safety. MAP and team potency interacted negatively on individual learning, indicating that the emergence of high potency in teams may compensate for low average level of MAP in teams. When running the complete research model, MAV and team psychological safety remained positively related to individual learning, in contrast to team potency and MAP. The implications of the findings for leadership teams are discussed.     

The transportability of multisystemic therapy to Sweden: short-term results from a randomized trial of conduct-disordered youths

This randomized clinical trial assessed the effectiveness of multisystemic therapy (MST) for 156 youths who met the diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder. Sweden's 3 largest cities and 1 small town served as the recruiting area for the study. A mixed factorial design was used, with random allocation between MST and treatment as usual groups. Assessments were conducted at intake and 7 months after referral. With an intention-to-treat approach, results from multiagent and multimethod assessment batteries showed a general decrease in psychiatric problems and antisocial behaviors among participants across treatments. There were no significant differences in treatment effects between the 2 groups. The lack of treatment effect did not appear to be caused by site differences or variations in program maturity. MST treatment fidelity was lower than that of other studies, although not clearly related to treatment outcomes in this study. The results are discussed in terms of differences between Sweden and the United States. One difference is the way in which young offenders are processed (a child welfare approach vs. a juvenile justice system approach). Sociodemographic differences (e.g., rates of poverty, crime, and substance abuse) between the 2 countries may also have moderating effects on the rates of rehabilitation among young offenders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Attentional shifts to emotionally charged cues: Behavioural and erp data

Abstract

When information activated in memory involves emotional associations, the ability to shift attention away from an emotional cue is impaired compared to an emotionally neutral cue. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, and how this is reflected in localised brain electrical activity. Eight emotion and eight neutral words served as cues in a covert attention spatial orienting task. The cues were either valid or invalid indicators of which hemifield the target would be presented to. In the remaining trials, no cue was presented prior to the target. Twenty subjects were instructed to manually respond to the target as fast as possible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed an enhanced P3 component to the emotion words. The ERPs to the target showed enhanced P1 and P3 components on invalid trials, with emotional cues. There were faster reaction times (RTs) to validly cued targets, but only when the emotion words served as cues. The results demonstrated that the emotional cues elicited sustained focused attention, facilitating an engage mechanism of spatial orienting.