Puerperal psychosis: Vulnerability and aftermath

The puerperium is a particularly vulnerable time for a depressive psychotic breakdown, with important consequences for both mother and child. While general psychiatric experience helps in the overall management, psychoanalytic insights help towards understanding the central psychopathology. Illustrative case-studies are presented.

Based on hospital admission rates, puerperal psychosis is regarded as a rare condition (one in 500 deliveries). In this paper, evidence is given to suggest that puerperal psychosis is a far commoner condition (three in 100 deliveries), and that many less-severe cases remain undetected and untreated in the community. It is argued that understanding interventions in these cases can be therapeutic for the mother, as well as having major implications for the baby's development.     

Reactions in Psychotherapy

The Pollyanna Principle states that people process pleasant information more accurately and efficiently than less pleasant information. This study examined whether different measures of Pollyanna tendencies are correlated with each other. Fourteen measures of Pollyannaism were derived for 133 students. The results showed that subjects who rated themselves as optimistic or happy also showed Pollyannaism on other measures of happiness, believed that the events in their lives were pleasant, gave themselves positive ratings on personality characteristics, recalled pleasant words more often than unpleasant words, supplied more free associations to pleasant stimuli than to unpleasant stimuli, listed pleasant items first, and judged that pleasant words were more frequent in the English language.     

Recognizing Specialized Terminology Presented Through Different Modes

In the present study, the authors examined how previous experience and modes of presenting information affect the recognition of terms in new, specialized terminologies. The specialized terminology used was related to orienteering. Orienteering concepts representing features found in the woods may be communicated verbally (as definitions or words) or symbolically. There were 225 participants (101 reported no orienteering experience and 122 reported varying amounts of orienteering experience; 2 did not respond to that question) who tried to identify which of 5 entities was an orienteering definition, word, or symbol. Those with orienteering experience found that recognizing the specialized terminology was significantly easier than for those without experience. Recognizing symbols was significantly more difficult than recognizing definitions or words, particularly for non-orienteers. Performance of the orienteers was similar for the three modes. Within the orienteering group, the number of years of experience and usual course difficulty attempted were significant predictors of overall test success. Applications to training of both low-level specialized terminology (e.g., used in algebra), and higher level terminology (e.g., used in computer science) are discussed.     

The Role of Recruit Division Commanders in Graduation From U.S. Navy Recruit Training

We investigated the importance of the role of drill instructors (RDCs) on training and retention of new sailors (N = 34,000). Based on social support and group cohesion literatures, we hypothesized that social support from RDCs would influence completion rates of entry-level Navy training and retention intention of new sailors. We found that perceptions of social support from RDCs had a significant positive relationship with eventual graduation from basic training; encouragement to remain in the Navy was particularly strongly related to graduation when the source of the encouragement was RDCs. Further, those who attrited from training were especially likely to perceive RDCs as encouraging them to leave the Navy. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of theory, research and practice.     

Peer harassment in primary school: the role of peers and its relationship with sociometric status

During the last decade, there has been a change in peer harassment research from a focus on the characteristics of the Aggressor-Victim dyad to the recognition of peer harassment as a whole group process, with most of children playing some kind of role. This study uses a shortened adaptation of the Participant-Role Questionnaire approach to identify these roles in 2,050 Spanish children aged 8 to 13 years. These Participant Roles were related to belonging to one of the five sociometric status groups. Factor analysis revealed four different roles, indicating that the adapted scale remains a reliable way of distinguishing the Aggressor, Victim, Defender of the victim, and Outsider roles. Boys played the roles of Aggressor and Victim significantly more frequently. The children's Participant Role was found to be related to their sociometric status. Progress in the measurement of peer harassment as a group process and the success of intervention strategies may depend on finding clearer distinctions among the different peer roles, mobilizing peer pressure, and isolating aggressors from their social support.     

“… And How About Now?”: Effects of Item Redundancy on Contextualized Self‐Reports of Personality

A common method of studying cross-situational variation in personality involves asking people to describe their behavior in several different contexts. Although this approach is intuitively appealing, it introduces a great deal of redundancy into the measurement process and may affect the interpretation of contextualized self-reports. Specifically, when participants are asked the same questions repeatedly in a single questionnaire, they may be compelled to focus on how their behavior is different. We tested this hypothesis by experimentally manipulating the number of contexts that were included in a measure of role-related personality. In 2 experiments (Study 1 N=377, Study 2 N=524), we found that multiple-role questionnaires produced greater variation in trait levels across roles, larger differences between general and role-specific ratings, and weaker correlations between general and role-specific ratings than single-role questionnaires. These findings illustrate how the measurement process can have an effect on the variability of responses to contextualized self-reports.     

Subjective well-being and adaptation to life events: a meta-analysis

Previous research has shown that major life events can have short- and long-term effects on subjective well-being (SWB). The present meta-analysis examines (a) whether life events have different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and (b) how the rate of adaptation varies across different life events. Longitudinal data from 188 publications (313 samples, N = 65,911) were integrated to describe the reaction and adaptation to 4 family events (marriage, divorce, bereavement, childbirth) and 4 work events (unemployment, reemployment, retirement, relocation/migration). The findings show that life events have very different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and that for most events the effects of life events on cognitive well-being are stronger and more consistent across samples. Different life events differ in their effects on SWB, but these effects are not a function of the alleged desirability of events. The results are discussed with respect to their theoretical implications, and recommendations for future studies on adaptation are given.     

The effects of unstable clients in adolescent treatment: contagion versus continuity

This study examined the effects of integrating an unstable group of seriously disturbed adolescents into an existing day treatment program. Behavioral data were collected for an established group of subjects who were in treatment one year prior to and one year after the arrival of a new group of severely disturbed adolescents. It was found that the disruptive behavior displayed by the new admission subjects was not imitated by the subjects of the established group. Rather, there was a significant decrease in aggression and in the overall number of psychiatric events for the established group. The treatment milieu was seen to be resistant to the effects of the new admissions largely due to the structured form of treatment.     

Glucocorticoid-mediated effects of systemic oxytocin upon memory retrieval

During the last decade, a considerable amount of evidence has accumulated to show that oxytocin (OT) is involved with functions other than its classical roles in reproduction-associated processes, such as social recognition, maternal behavior and neuroendocrine regulation of the stress response. It has been shown, for instance, that post-training systemic administration of oxytocin in mice produces an amnestic effect on the step-through inhibitory avoidance. Since it is still unclear how systemic levels of OT may affect CNS memory processes, our aim here was to investigate the hypothesis that systemic OT effects on memory retrieval might be mediated through an oxytocin-induced decrease in glucocorticoid release. In our first experiment, we have found an amnestic effect of i.p. pre-test 0.4 microg/kg of OT upon memory retrieval in the inhibitory avoidance task (IA); this OT dose was shown to (a) significantly decrease plasma corticosterone levels when compared to the saline group, and (b) not to cause any anxiety effects by itself in a plus-maze task. At last, an ineffective-by-itself dose of dexamethasone was able to reverse the amnestic effect of this OT dose. Our results suggest that the amnestic effect of systemically administered oxytocin upon memory retrieval in the inhibitory avoidance task was probably caused by an oxytocin-induced decrease in glucocorticoid release from the adrenal gland.