Brief owner absence does not induce negative judgement bias in pet dogs

Humans in a negative emotional state are more likely to judge ambiguous stimuli as negative. In recent years, similar judgement biases have been found in some non-human animals that were exposed to long-term or short-term treatments aimed at influencing their affective states. Here we tested pet dogs in the presence and absence of their owners in a judgement bias test with an established go/no-go procedure. Even though owner absence is thought to induce a state of anxiety in dogs that have formed an attachment bond with their primary caretakers, we found no difference between the dogs' responses to ambiguous stimuli in the presence or absence of their owners. This result may be explained by the absence of anxiety in dogs that are accustomed to brief periods of separation from their owners, or by a sensitivity limit of the customary judgement bias tests in non-human animals when only a moderate, short-term state of anxiety is induced. In addition, we found significant differences between individuals and populations in the responses to ambiguous stimuli, which give impetus for further research.     

Impaired executive functions in subjects with frequent nightmares as reflected by performance in different neuropsychological tasks

Nightmare disorder is a prevalent parasomnia characterized by vivid and highly unpleasant dream experiences during night time sleep. The neural background of disturbed dreaming was proposed to be associated with impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning during REM sleep. We hypothesized that the impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning in subjects with frequent nightmares would be reflected at the behavioral level during waking tasks as well. 35-35 Subjects with frequent nightmares and matched controls participated in Study 1, involving an Emotional Go/NoGo, an Emotional Stroop task, and a Verbal Fluency task. Nightmare subjects exhibited longer reaction times in the Emotional Go/NoGo and Emotional Stroop tasks. Moreover, they committed more perseveration errors and showed less fluent word generation in the Verbal Fluency task. Nightmare subjects showed an overall slowing irrespective of the valence of the stimuli. While the effects of sleep quality and waking anxiety were associated to these deficits in some cases, these factors could not solely explain the difference between the two groups. In Study 2, 17 subjects with frequent nightmares and 18 controls were compared by a Color-word and an Emotional, block design Stroop task in order to avoid the slow effects of emotional interference potentially caused by previous items. Nightmare subjects were characterized by an overall slowing in the Emotional Stroop task, irrespective of the valence of the stimuli. In the Color-word Stroop task, nightmare subjects were not significantly slower in comparison with controls. Our results suggest that individuals with frequent nightmares are impaired in executive tasks involving the suppression of task-irrelevant semantic representations.     

Wie kann man in der Sozialtherapie Therapieerfolg feststellen oder messen?

The tradition of social therapeutic evaluation research in Germany is as old as the institution of social therapy itself. Social therapeutic facilities constitute the royal road to correctional treatment in the German prison system providing an integrated approach for offender treatment by means of psychotherapy (mainly cognitive-behavioral), vocational and job training, social work and leisure time therapy embedded in a therapeutic community. It was generally expected that evaluation research would prove the effectiveness of this method and generate results for the advancement of offender treatment. However, research results have yielded only moderate findings concerning the effects of social therapeutic interventions. This article considers how the outcome of social therapy and offender treatment is measured. Fundamental methodological challenges that evaluation research has to face are identified. In addition, a short overview of recent results from a longitudinal evaluation study is presented to substantiate the dilemmas and solutions of evaluation research in this field. It is discussed why it is so difficult to provide evidence for effectiveness of correctional treatment and concluded that this can by no means lead to a renunciation of the correctional treatment approach.     

A long‐term fatty fish intervention improved executive function in inpatients with antisocial traits and a history of alcohol and drug abuse

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of fatty fish consumption on cognitive functioning in a group of inpatients characterized by antisocial behavior. Eighty‐three male forensic inpatients participated in this study. Participants were randomly assigned into a Fish or a Control group (e.g., meat, chicken, pork). One decision‐making task, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), and one planning task, the Tower of Hanoi (ToH), were administered before (pre‐test) and at the end of the intervention period (post‐test). For the IGT the Fish group showed improved performance from pre‐ to post‐ test. Moreover, the Fish group showed significantly better performance than the Control group on the IGT at post‐test. The Fish group also demonstrated improved performance from pre‐ to post‐test on the ToH; however, this was limited to participants with a history of substance abuse. Further, the improvement was only significant for tasks with high working memory load (5–7 move problems), and not for tasks with low working memory load (1–4 move problems). The Control group showed no improvement on any of the tasks regardless of alcohol or drug abuse history. The present study suggests that regular fatty fish consumption may improve executive functions in forensic inpatients with antisocial traits and a history of substance abuse. Thus, the current results may have important implications with regard to health care interventions.     

Memory in 3‐month‐old infants benefits from a short nap

A broad range of studies demonstrate that sleep has a facilitating role in memory consolidation (see Rasch & Born, 2013 ). Whether sleep‐dependent memory consolidation is also apparent in infants in their first few months of life has not been investigated. We demonstrate that 3‐month‐old infants only remember a cartoon face approximately 1.5–2 hours after its first presentation when a period of sleep followed learning. Furthermore, habituation time, that is, the time to become bored with a stimulus shown repetitively, correlated negatively with the density of infant sleep spindles, implying that processing speed is linked to specific electroencephalographic components of sleep. Our findings show that without a short period of sleep infants have problems remembering a newly seen face, that sleep enhances memory consolidation from a very early age, highlighting the importance of napping in infancy, and that infant sleep spindles may be associated with some aspects of cognitive ability.     

The Spanish version of the Wisconsin Personality Disorders Inventory-IV (WISPI-IV): tests of validity and reliability

Personality disorders (PD) are a prevalent class of mental disorders that interfere with functioning and cause subjective distress while increasing the intensity and duration of Axis I clinical syndromes, and therefore assessing PD is important even when PDs are not the focus of treatment. The purpose of these studies was to develop and test a new Spanish version of a self-report measure of PD, the Wisconsin Personality Inventory-IV (WISPI-IV) that would be psychometrically equivalent to the English version while also maintaining the same interpersonal content, which is based on Benjamin's analysis of the PD criteria using her Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB) model (1974). Study 1 participants completed the WISPI-IV twice over a two-week interval. For Study 2, participants from two sites in Spain and one site in Argentina completed Spanish versions of the WISPI-IV and other personality measures. SASB-analysis of the translated items showed high correspondence between the interpersonal content of the English version and the Spanish version demonstrating theoretical validation in relation to other PD measures. The Spanish WISPI-IV showed satisfactory reliability based on test-retest correlations and alphas for internal consistency. Study 2 showed the Spanish WISPI-IV had good convergent validity with the Spanish versions of the IIP and SCID-II and performed similarly to the English versions of these measures. Our goal in translating the WISPI-IV was to extend this measure to Spanish-speakers in language that would be understood by different Hispanic sub-groups, however research team members and subjects had a variety of suggestions for changes in item wording. This reflects the difficulty with creating a "neutral" Spanish version of any assessment given regional differences.     

Die Bedeutung der Säuglingsforschung, Bindungstheorie und Neurowissenschaften für den psychoanalytischen Prozess

Zusammenfassung Die Ergebnisse von Säuglingsbeobachtungen und der Interaktionen in der Mutter-Kind-Dyade gingen bereits früh im Verlauf der Theoriegeschichte der Psychoanalyse in deren entwicklungspsychologische, psychodynamische und behandlungstechnische Überlegungen ein, beispielsweise bei Spitz und Winnicott. Winnicotts Konzept vom wahren Selbst (1960) hat noch heute Aktualität. Aus heutiger Sicht (Fonagy et al. 2004) fällt ein Teil des Selbst bereits früh aus dem Mutter-Kind-Dialog heraus, indem er von der Mutter nicht oder nur unzulänglich gespiegelt wird und deshalb nicht integriert werden kann. Klöpper zeigt, dass es zum impliziten Beziehungswissen des Kindes und des späteren Patienten gehört, dass bestimmte Seiten seines emotional-affektiven Erlebens keinen Eingang in seine aktuellen Beziehungen finden können. Hier setzen behandlungstechnische Konzepte von Psychoanalytikern unter den Säuglingsforschern (Beebe u. Lachmann 2002; Stern 1998) an und zeigen Wege auf, wie das wahre Selbst wieder zu beleben ist. So jedenfalls interpretiert der Autor deren Konzepte und zeigt an einer Behandlungsvignette die Grundzüge des behandlungstechnischen Vorgehens dabei. Klöpper schlägt vor, den Zustand des Selbst während der analytischen Arbeit stets unter drei Gesichtpunkten zu reflektieren: (1) entwicklungsbedingte Defizite, (2) ungelöste Konflikte und (3) Kolonisierung durch Affektzustände der primären Beziehungspersonen (Fonagy et al. 2004). Den Ergebnissen der Säuglingsforschung entnimmt er drei behandlungstechnische Prinzipien: (1) ständige Beachtung der gegenseitigen regulatorischen Prozesse in der analytischen Dyade mit deren Unterbrechung und Wiederherstellung; (2) ständige Bereitschaft des Analytikers, in diesem Kontext seine Selbstobjektfunktion zur Verfügung zu stellen; (3) ständiges Bestreben des Analytikers, die zugehörigen Beziehungszusammenhänge im Hier und Jetzt explizit deutend bewusst werden zu lassen. Die kontinuierliche Beachtung dieser Prinzipien ermöglicht das Bewusstwerden impliziten Beziehungswissens (Lyons-Ruth 1998), lässt neues implizites Beziehungswissen entstehen und ermöglicht dem Analysanden die Bildung sekundärer Repräsentanzen seiner Affekte (Fonagy et al. 2004).

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The importance of infant research, attachment theory and neurosciences for the psychoanalytic process

The results of infant observation and of the ineractions in the mother-child-dyad were early in the development of psychoanalytic theory included into the considerations about developmental psychology, psychodynamics and treatment techniques, e.g. by Spitz and Winnicott. Winnicotts concept of the true self (1960) is still valid. In contemporary view (Fonagy et al. 2004) one part of the self is excluded from the mother-child-dialogue being not at all or insufficiently mirrored by the mother. Consequently, it cannot be integrated. Klöpper shows that implicit relational knowledge of the child or patient includes the recognition, that some parts of his emotional-affective experience cannot be brought into his actual relationships. At this point, technical concepts of the psychoanalysts among the infant researchers (Beebe u. Lachmann 2004; Stern et al.1998) are helpful to show the ways how to revive the true self. At least, this is the view of the author about these concepts. He also presents a case study to demonstrate the technical procedure in this reviving process. Klöpper proposes to reflect the state of self during the analytical process continously under three point of views: 1. developmental deficits; 2. unsolved conflicts; 3. colonization by the affective states of primary attachment persons (Fonagy et al. 2004). The results of infant research show him three treatment technical principles: 1) constantly paying attention to the mutual regulatory processes in the analytical dyad, and to its disruption and repair; 2) constant readiness of the analyst to offer his self-object-function in this context; 3) constant effort of the analyst to make possible by explicit interpretations to become aware of the connected implicit relational contexts in the Here-and-Now of the actual relationships. The continuous application of these principles allow that implicit relational knowledge becomes conscious (Lyons-Ruth 1998), new implicit knowledge can develop and secondary representations of the own affects can be formed (Fonagy et al. 2004)

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Überarbeitete Fassung eines Vortrages vor der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für integrative Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie u. Psychosomatik (APH, Hamburg) am 06.04.2003 und anlässlich der Psychotherapie-Tage auf Langeoog im Mai 2003.