Oxytocin responsivity in mothers of infants: a preliminary study of relationships with blood pressure during laboratory stress and normal ambulatory activity.

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) enhances maternal behavior and decreases blood pressure (BP) and stress responses in animals. Thus, the relationship of OT responsivity to BP in 14 breast- and 11 bottle-feeding mothers of infants was examined. Laboratory BP was assessed during baseline, speech preparation, active speech, and recovery on 2 days, 1 in which baseline and speech were separated by 10 min of baby holding and the other by no baby contact. Systolic BP reactivity to speech was lower after baby contact. Plasma OT change from baseline to speech after baby contact defined OT increase, minimal OT change, and OT decrease groups. OT increase mothers were primarily breast-feeders, and they had lower BP throughout both stress sessions and after baby feeding at home than OT decrease mothers, who also had greater BP reactivity to preparation and recovery. These results suggest that oxytocin has antistress and BP-lowering effects in humans.     

The Role of Negative Information in Distributional Semantic Learning

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co‐occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co‐occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co‐occurrences with vector accumulation. All of these models learned from positive information only: Words that occur together within a context become related to each other. A recent class of distributional models, referred to as neural embedding models, are based on a prediction process embedded in the functioning of a neural network: Such models predict words that should surround a target word in a given context (e.g., word2vec; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). An error signal derived from the prediction is used to update each word's representation via backpropagation. However, another key difference in predictive models is their use of negative information in addition to positive information to develop a semantic representation. The models use negative examples to predict words that should not surround a word in a given context. As before, an error signal derived from the prediction prompts an update of the word's representation, a procedure referred to as negative sampling. Standard uses of word2vec recommend a greater or equal ratio of negative to positive sampling. The use of negative information in developing a representation of semantic information is often thought to be intimately associated with word2vec's prediction process. We assess the role of negative information in developing a semantic representation and show that its power does not reflect the use of a prediction mechanism. Finally, we show how negative information can be efficiently integrated into classic count‐based semantic models using parameter‐free analytical transformations.     

“Everybody's Teaching and Everybody's Learning”: Photovoice and Youth Counseling

Social justice initiatives within counseling practice have led to calls for interventions that promote critical consciousness and connect youth to their communities. Photovoice projects, which fall under the heading of youth participatory action research, represent promising vehicles for this work. The authors suggest that photovoice activities have a place within the framework of developmental youth counseling programming and present an overview of a photovoice project conducted in collaboration with a community‐based organization.     

Getting one's thoughts straight: a dialogical analysis of women's accounts of poorly controlled type 2 diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder characterised by chronically elevated blood glucose and a high risk of cardiovascular and other complications. Self-management is central to diabetes care and includes taking regular exercise, low-fat/sugar diet and blood glucose monitoring. However, little is understood about how people with diabetes make sense of self-management. Our aim, therefore, is to explore the process of 'getting one's thoughts straight' in relation to illness self-management for women with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes. Eight women were recruited from two hospitals in the North of England. Each was interviewed using a biographic-narrative method. Narratives were analysed using a dialogical approach. We use Bakhtin's concepts of voice, official and unofficial truth, and internally persuasive discourse to explore how participants considered, struggled with, and, sometimes, acted upon self-management. We demonstrate how the truth by which participants lived shifted as they encountered new perspectives and experiences. The accounts revealed tension between official, authoritative voices, typically concerned with optimal illness control and unofficial voices that speak at a lived, embodied level. In conclusion, we suggest moving beyond the notion of self-management towards a conceptualisation of life with chronic illness that includes personal goals, values and embodied experience in context.     

New Nomenclature for Sexually Abusive Youth: Naming and Assessing Sexually Violent and Predatory Offenders

New nomenclature is presented identifying two subsets of sexually abusive youths currently not defined in the literature or in existing models or risk assessment tools: sexually violent youth (YSV) and predatory sexually violent youth (YPSV). Distinctively and qualitatively different, these youths are more dangerous, manifest higher levels of coercion (e.g., threats of bodily injury, use of weapons), or are predatory sexually violent toward strangers or casual acquaintances. Discussed is the innovative, empirically guided risk assessment tool Multiplex Empirically Guided Inventory of Ecological Aggregates for Assessing Sexually Abusive Children and Adolescents (Ages 19 and Under) (MEGA) (Miccio-Fonseca, 2006a Miccio-Fonseca, L. C. August 2006a. Multiplex Empirically Guided Inventory of Ecological Aggregates for Assessing Sexually Abusive Children and Adolescents (Ages 19 and Under)—MEGA, August, San Diego, CA: Author.  [Google Scholar]) for assessing the level of risk for all youths (male and female) under the age of 19 years, including YSVs and YPSVs.     

Clinical concepts

In this section authors have written about the Winnicottian concept that they value most in their everyday working lives. This provides a valuable insight into the ways in which Winnicott's work is being used as a springboard for new ideas, as well as enlightening familiar ground. It is striking to see how the original Winnicottian idea takes on new form as it is taken up by new generations of clinicians. Despite the absence of a Winnicottian training school, his pervasive impact continues to influence current theory and practice.     

Evaluating New York City’s Smoke-Free Parks and Beaches Law: A Critical Multiplist Approach to Assessing Behavioral Impact

This article describes the evaluation of the law banning smoking in New York City’s parks and beaches that went into effect in 2011. We discuss the practical and methodological challenges that emerged in evaluating this law, and describe how we applied the principles of critical multiplism to address these issues. The evaluation uses data from three complementary studies, each with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses that can provide converging evidence for the effectiveness of the law. Results from a litter audit and an observational study suggest the ban reduced smoking in parks and beaches. The purpose, methodology and baseline results from an ongoing survey that measures how frequently adults in NYC and across New York State notice people smoking in parks and on beaches are presented and discussed. Limitations are considered and suggestions are offered for future evaluations of similar policies.