The power of rituals in dealing with traumatic stress symptoms: cleansing rituals for former child soldiers in Northern Uganda

International guidelines for emergency response note the importance of cultural adaptions and facilitation of local spiritual and religious healing practices when appropriate. Deciding whether traditional medicine is safe, effective and appropriate is a complex matter. This study explores the therapeutic factors of a local cleansing ritual in Northern Uganda aimed at healing former child soldiers. The components of the ritual are analysed and compared with research-based therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. Participant observation was used during the ritual, followed by qualitative in-depth interviews and follow-up interviews over three years. The key informant is a former child soldier participating in the ritual. He was abducted and forced to commit several killings during a three-year period. The collective mobilisation of social support, the collective forgiveness and the strength of the psycho-education appear central for the effect of the ritual. In addition, the ritual draws on common therapeutic factors. The findings indicate that such a ritual involves elements that safely and effectively deal with symptoms in accordance with modern research on trauma therapy, perhaps more powerfully than Western-style therapy. Implications for collaboration with local healers in emergency settings are indicated.     

“If I Didn't Have My Faith I Would Have Killed Myself!”: Spiritual Coping in Patients Suffering From Schizophrenia

Spirituality, religiousness, and existential thought were qualitatively investigated in six patients suffering from schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The present study is a deepening of a recently published quantitative investigation by Danbolt, Møller, Lien, and Hestad (2011) Danbolt, L., Møller, P., Lien, L. and Hestad, K. 2011. The personal significance of religiousness and spirituality in patients with schizophrenia. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 21: 145–158. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. The patients in the present study were chosen on the basis of diversity as to how they experienced their spirituality to be of significance when coping with their disorder. The informants displayed many signs of spiritual struggle and transitional spiritual coping strategies, all of which seemed to be linked to hallucinatory experiences. Even though their spirituality met the criteria of religious delusions, the patients described their spirituality to have vital importance. The informants showed little spiritual preknowledge and seemed to be left alone without any clerical support in their spiritual struggle. This may underline the importance of including spiritual issues in the treatment of these patients.     

Late reaction times identify MCI

A group of 172 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and 79 healthy control participants (HC) were tested on simple reaction time (SRT). There was a significant difference between MCI and HC in mean SRT. The test could be partitioned into five segments of 16 trials each, but RT's were not always available for each partition. However, scores from each segment for 166 MCI and 41 of the HC's were available. These data showed that a significant interaction between RT‐partition and diagnostic category was the main source of the difference between groups. The interaction indicated that MCI patients performed at about the same level as HC in the initial three of the five segments of the test, but were significantly impaired during the last two segments of the 80 trials. The results were interpreted as impaired sustained attention among a large part of the MCI group, and the study shows the importance of taking into account all avaliable data resulting from this type of test.     

Effects of pre-learning stress on memory for neutral, positive and negative words: Different roles of cortisol and autonomic arousal

Stress can have enhancing or impairing effects on memory. Here, we addressed the effect of pre-learning stress on subsequent memory and asked whether neutral and emotionally valent information are differentially affected by specific stress components, autonomic arousal and stress-induced cortisol. Ninety-six healthy men and women underwent either a stressor (modified cold pressor test) or a control warm water exposure. During stress, participants showed comparable autonomic arousal (heart rate, blood pressure), while 60 percent showed an increase of cortisol (responders vs. 40 percent non-responders). Ten minutes after the cold pressor test neutral, positive and negative words were presented. Free recall was tested 1 and 24 h later. Overall, positive and negative words were better recalled than neutral words. Stress enhanced the recall of neutral words independently of cortisol response. In contrast, the free recall of negative words was enhanced in cortisol responders in the 1-h but not 24-h test which might suggest different effects of cortisol on consolidation and reconsolidation processes. Recall for positive words was unaffected by stress-induced cortisol. To summarize, (i) pre-learning stress can enhance memory for neutral words independently of cortisol and (ii) stress effects on memory for negative words appear to rely on stress-induced cortisol elevations, the absence of this effect for positive words might be at least partly due to differences in arousal evoked by positive vs. negative words.     

Chronic stress modulates the use of spatial and stimulus-response learning strategies in mice and man

Acute stress modulates multiple memory systems in favor of caudate nucleus-dependent stimulus-response and at the expense of hippocampus-dependent spatial learning and memory. We examined in mice and humans whether chronic stress has similar consequences. Male C57BL/6J mice that had been repeatedly exposed to rats ("rat stress") used in a circular hole board task significantly more often a stimulus-response strategy (33%) than control mice (0%). While velocity was increased, differences in latency to exit hole, distance moved or number of holes visited were not observed. Increased velocity and performance during retention trials one day later indicates altered emotionality and motivation to explore in rat stressed mice. Forty healthy young men and women were split into "high chronic stress" and "low chronic stress" groups based on their answers in a chronic stress questionnaire ("Trier Inventory of Chronic Stress"-TICS) and trained in a 2D task. A test trial immediately after training revealed that participants of the "high chronic stress" group used the S-R strategy significantly more often (94%) than participants of the "low chronic stress" group (52%). Verbal self-reports confirmed the strategy derived from participants' choice in the test trial. Learning performance was unaffected by the chronic stress level. We conclude that one consequence of chronic stress is the shift to more rigid stimulus-response learning, that is accompanied by changes in motivational factors in mice.     

Self-esteem reactions to social interactions: evidence for sociometer mechanisms across days, people, and nations

People have a fundamental need to belong that motivates them to seek out social interactions with close others (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Leary and Baumeister's (2000) sociometer theory (SMT) poses that people who succeed in satisfying this need have higher self-esteem (SE). This prediction was tested across three hierarchical levels: intraindividual, interindividual, and international. Indicators of social interaction quantity, quality, and the interaction between quality and quantity were collected for relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners. On the intraindividual level, relationship quality and the interaction between quantity and quality emerged as significant predictors of daily fluctuations in SE. Cross-lagged analyses indicated that this association is at least partly due to the effect of social inclusion on changes in SE. On an interindividual level, people who generally reported higher quality relationships also had higher levels of trait SE. On an international level, countries whose inhabitants regularly interact with friends were characterized by higher nationwide SE levels than countries without such practices, even when happiness, individualism, gross domestic product, and neuroticism were controlled.     

Sex differences and lifestyle-dependent shifts in the attunement of self-esteem to self-perceived mate value: Hints to an adaptive mechanism?

It has been suggested that self-esteem is reactive to signs of social rejection, and that this “sociometer” mechanism becomes attuned to those personal attributes that affect social acceptance by significant others. Based on evolutionary models of human mating, we predicted that self-esteem should be more attuned to self-perceived mate value in men (when compared to women) who pursue short-term mating tactics, especially if they are unsuccessful therein. In a web-based study (N = 2670), we found that mate value self-perceptions had a stronger effect on self-esteem on those who had less short-term mating success in the past. However, being in a committed relationship or parenthood reduced the impact of mate value self-perceptions. As expected, these effects were specific to men. These results are suggestive of a psychological mechanism based on adaptive sociometer attunements that could help men to choose their optimal mating tactic and might thus partly explain intrasexual differences in sociosexuality.     

Evidence for conditional sex differences in emotional but not in sexual jealousy at the automatic level of cognitive processing

The two evolutionary psychological hypotheses that men react more jealous than women to sexual infidelity and women react more jealous than men to emotional infidelity are currently controversial because of apparently inconsistent results. We suggest that these inconsistencies can be resolved when the two hypotheses are evaluated separately and when the underlying cognitive processes are considered. We studied jealousy with forced‐choice decisions and emotion ratings in a general population sample of 284 adults aged 20–30 years using six infidelity dilemmas and recordings of reaction times. The sex difference for emotional jealousy existed for decisions under cognitive constraint, was also evident in the decision speed, increased for faster decisions, and was stronger for participants with lower education. No evidence for a sex difference in sexual jealousy was found. Our results support the view of a specific female sensitivity to emotional infidelity that canalizes the development of an adaptive sex difference in emotional jealousy conditional to the sociocultural environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.