Exploring How Parents Make Sense of Change in Parent-Child Psychotherapy

Understanding how change occurs in psychotherapy is imperative in informing clinical practice. Increasing attention has been given to the role that qualitative research could play in enhancing our understanding of therapeutic change. Although quantitative research suggests that parent-child psychotherapy is effective in facilitating change, no research to date has focused on how parents make sense of their change experience. In this study, interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze semi-structured interviews of eight parents who had completed parent-child psychotherapy about their understanding of change. Five master themes emerged that encapsulated participants’ understanding of change. These included constructing a survivor narrative, the experience of being understood enabling further understanding, adjusting expectations and practicing acceptance, and feeling empowered to relinquish control. The final theme summarized how despite psychotherapy being conceptualized as a “precious” resource, there was a sense that its limitations could negatively impact participant’s well-being.     

Creating Safer and More Nurturing Schools: Expanding the Capacity of Schools in the Era of Future National Reform

ABSTRACT

Positive academic performance is a strong indicator of subsequent positive life course outcomes (e.g., employment) as well as underrepresentation in psychiatric populations, drug use, school dropout, and subsequent legal trouble (A. Farn & J. Adams, 2016). As such, helping all children to be successful in school is a top priority for parents, educators, and politicians alike. However, schools are challenged by an increasing demand to meet children's health and metal health needs in order for them to benefit from, and progress in, their educational experience. Public concerns regarding violent acts on school property have highlighted the need to address student and teacher safety. The authors provide recommendations for school psychologists regarding promising practices that respond to national initiatives to prevent school violence, increase access to health and mental health care, and enhance equity among students.     

Constructing representations of spatial location from briefly presented displays

Spatial memory and reasoning rely heavily on allocentric (often map-like) representations of spatial knowledge. While research has documented many ways in which spatial information can be represented in allocentric form, less is known about how such representations are constructed. For example: Are the very early, pre-attentive parts of the process hard-wired, or can they be altered by experience? We addressed this issue by presenting sub-saccadic (53 ms) masked stimuli consisting of a target among one to three reference features. We then shifted the location of the feature array, and asked participants to identify the target’s new relative location. Experience altered feature processing even when the display duration was too short to allow attention re-allocation. The results demonstrate the importance of early perceptual processes in the creation of representations of spatial location, and the malleability of those processes based on experience and expectations.     

Computational cognitive modeling of the temporal dynamics of fatigue from sleep loss

Computational models have become common tools in psychology. They provide quantitative instantiations of theories that seek to explain the functioning of the human mind. In this paper, we focus on identifying deep theoretical similarities between two very different models. Both models are concerned with how fatigue from sleep loss impacts cognitive processing. The first is based on the diffusion model and posits that fatigue decreases the drift rate of the diffusion process. The second is based on the Adaptive Control of Thought – Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture and posits that fatigue decreases the utility of candidate actions leading to microlapses in cognitive processing. A biomathematical model of fatigue is used to control drift rate in the first account and utility in the second. We investigated the predicted response time distributions of these two integrated computational cognitive models for performance on a psychomotor vigilance test under conditions of total sleep deprivation, simulated shift work, and sustained sleep restriction. The models generated equivalent predictions of response time distributions with excellent goodness-of-fit to the human data. More importantly, although the accounts involve different modeling approaches and levels of abstraction, they represent the effects of fatigue in a functionally equivalent way: in both, fatigue decreases the signal-to-noise ratio in decision processes and decreases response inhibition. This convergence suggests that sleep loss impairs psychomotor vigilance performance through degradation of the quality of cognitive processing, which provides a foundation for systematic investigation of the effects of sleep loss on other aspects of cognition. Our findings illustrate the value of treating different modeling formalisms as vehicles for discovery.     

The expulsion from Disneyland: the social psychological impact of 9/11

People expressed many different reactions to the events of September 11th, 2001. Some of these reactions were clearly negative, such as political intolerance, discrimination, and hate crimes directed toward targets that some, if not many, people associated with the attackers. Other reactions were more positive. For example, people responded by donating blood, increasing contributions of time and money to charity, and flying the American flag. The goal of this article is to review some of Americans' negative and positive reactions to 9/11. We also describe two frameworks, value protection and terror management theory, that provide insights into Americans' various reactions to the tragedy of 9/11.     

Prospective prediction of nonsuicidal self-injury: a 1-year longitudinal study in young adults

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) has become a significant public health problem. Although numerous studies have examined cross-sectional psychological correlates of NSSI, there has been little research examining predictors of NSSI over time. The present study examined cross-sectional and longitudinal correlates of NSSI in 81 young adult self-injurers (M age = 19, 74.1% female, 51.9% Caucasian), 51 of whom were followed up 1 year later. At baseline, participants completed self-report measures of NSSI, Axis-I disorders, borderline personality disorder (BPD), and impulsivity, as well as an implicit measure of NSSI attitudes and identity. One year later, participants completed a Timeline Followback Method whereby they indicated their engagement in NSSI over the previous 12 months. Analyses replicated many known cross-sectional correlates of NSSI, including symptoms of several Axis-I disorders and BPD. However, many of these same variables failed to predict the course of NSSI over the 1-year follow-up. The only variables to prospectively predict NSSI were past NSSI (i.e., frequency, methods, and recency of NSSI), participants’ behavioral forecast of their engagement in future NSSI, and BPD features. Findings suggest that many cross-sectional correlates of NSSI may not be useful for predicting subsequent NSSI. Instead, NSSI severity and BPD features appear to best predict continued engagement in NSSI.     

Elevated trajectories of externalizing problems are associated with lower awakening cortisol levels in midadolescence

A growing body of research suggesting a negative association between basal levels of cortisol and persistent antisocial behavior has emerged. The present study examined relations between awakening cortisol levels and antisocial trajectories from ages 5 to 15 years among individuals in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Antisocial behavior was defined by semiparametric group modeling techniques, which revealed antisocial patterns parallel to Moffitt's (1993) taxonomy of antisocial trajectories. In contrast to the claim that biological diatheses are uniquely characteristic of individuals who demonstrate an early-onset pattern of antisocial behavior, our results suggest that individuals with elevated patterns of antisocial behavior between 5 and 15 years of age-irrespective of the timing of onset or desistance-are more likely to evidence lower awakening cortisol levels compared with individuals with persistently low levels of antisocial behavior.     

Empathy gaps for social pain: why people underestimate the pain of social suffering

In 5 studies, the authors examined the hypothesis that people have systematically distorted beliefs about the pain of social suffering. By integrating research on empathy gaps for physical pain (Loewenstein, 1996) with social pain theory (MacDonald & Leary, 2005), the authors generated the hypothesis that people generally underestimate the severity of social pain (ostracism, shame, etc.)--a biased judgment that is only corrected when people actively experience social pain for themselves. Using a social exclusion manipulation, Studies 1-4 found that nonexcluded participants consistently underestimated the severity of social pain compared with excluded participants, who had a heightened appreciation for social pain. This empathy gap for social pain occurred when participants evaluated both the pain of others (interpersonal empathy gap) as well as the pain participants themselves experienced in the past (intrapersonal empathy gap). The authors argue that beliefs about social pain are important because they govern how people react to socially distressing events. In Study 5, middle school teachers were asked to evaluate policies regarding emotional bullying at school. This revealed that actively experiencing social pain heightened the estimated pain of emotional bullying, which in turn led teachers to recommend both more comprehensive treatment for bullied students and greater punishment for students who bully.     

The role of problem solving in complex intraverbal repertoires

We examined whether typically developing preschoolers could learn to use a problem-solving strategy that involved self-prompting with intraverbal chains to provide multiple responses to intraverbal categorization questions. Teaching the children to use the problem-solving strategy did not produce significant increases in target responses until problem solving was modeled and prompted. Following the model and prompts, all participants showed immediate significant increases in intraverbal categorization, and all prompts were quickly eliminated. Use of audible self-prompts was evident initially for all participants, but declined over time for 3 of the 4 children. Within-session response patterns remained consistent with use of the problem-solving strategy even when self-prompts were not audible. These findings suggest that teaching and prompting a problem-solving strategy can be an effective way to produce intraverbal categorization responses.