Immortality

In December, the President's Council on Bioethics released Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. Here, Lustig discusses the six-part report that provides a balanced but critical assessment of actual and prospective developments in biotechnology and seeks to anchor its discussion in shared moral and metaphysical concerns--the nature of human nature, and the social and political implications of unfettered choices in altering the human prospect through biotechnology.     

On Imagination: Reconciling Knowledge and Life,or What Does “Gregory Bateson” Stand for?

This article presents a reading of Gregory Bateson's oeuvre, focusing on his interest in the representational gap between map and territory, and its importance in the development of his redefinition of the concept of "mind," his new discipline called "ecology of ideas," and a methodology congruent to it based on the logics of metaphor. Inquiries on three initial stories from different domains allow the use of homologies between form and content in the article. This reading of Bateson's oeuvre stresses his questioning (like Derrida's) of the metaphysics of presence on which Western philosophy has been mostly based, and of the central role of imagination as a balancing factor for a family therapy that he both contributed to and saw with reservations.     

The importance of parents and other caregivers to the resilience of high-risk adolescents

Relationships between 43 high-risk adolescents and their caregivers were examined qualitatively. Parents and other formal and informal caregivers such as youth workers and foster parents were found to exert a large influence on the behaviors that bolster mental health among high-risk youth marginalized by poverty, social stigma, personal and physical characteristics, ethnicity, and poor social or academic performance. Participants' accounts of their intergenerational relationships with caregivers showed that teenagers seek close relationships with adults in order to negotiate for powerful self-constructions as resilient. High-risk teens say they want the adults in their lives to serve as an audience in front of whom they can perform the identities they construct both inside and outside their homes. This pattern was evident even among youth who presented as being more peer-than family-oriented. The implications of these findings to interventions with caregivers and teens is discussed.     

The vulnerability cycle: working with impasses in couple therapy

In this article, we propose the vulnerability cycle as a construct for understanding and working with couples' impasses. We expand the interactional concept of couples' reciprocal patterns to include behavioral and subjective dimensions, and articulate specific processes that trigger and maintain couples' entanglements. We consider the vulnerability cycle as a nexus of integration in which "vulnerabilities" and "survival positions" are key ideas that bring together interactional, sociocultural, intrapsychic, and intergenerational levels of meaning and process. The vulnerability cycle diagram is presented as a tool for organizing information. We suggest a therapeutic approach for deconstructing couples' impasses and facilitating new patterns through deliberate modes of questioning, a freeze-frame technique, stimulation of calmness and reflection, separating present from past, and elicitation of alternative meanings, behaviors, empathy, and choice. This approach encourages the therapist and couple to work collaboratively in promoting change and resilience.     

Are there biological programming effects for psychological development? Findings from a study of Romanian adoptees

Associations between experiences and outcomes could be due to (a) continuation of adversity or (b) organismic changes, including experience-expectant and experience-adaptive developmental programming. The adoption into British families of children who had been reared in profoundly depriving institutions in Romania presented an opportunity to test mechanisms. Romanian children reared from infancy in very depriving institutions for periods up to 42 months were compared with 52 nondeprived UK-born children placed into adoptive families before the age of 6 months. The results at 6 years of age showed substantial normal cognitive and social functioning after the provision of family rearing but also major persistent deficits in a substantial minority. The pattern of findings suggests some form of early biological programming or neural damage stemming from institutional deprivation, but the heterogeneity in outcome indicates that the effects are not deterministic.     

Do you "want" to play? Distinguishing between conflicted shyness and social disinterest in early childhood

This study attempted to distinguish two types of social withdrawal in early childhood: (a) one based on social fear and anxiety despite a desire to interact socially (conflicted shyness) and (b) one based on the lack of a strong motivation to engage in social interaction (social disinterest). Two samples of preschoolers (n = 119 and n = 127) 3-5 years of age participated. Their mothers completed the newly developed Child Social Preference Scale, which was designed to assess conflicted shyness and social disinterest. Maternal ratings of child temperament, parenting style, and social goals, teacher ratings of child social adjustment, observations of child free-play behaviors, and child interview assessments of perceived competence and preference for playing with peers were also collected. Distinct patterns of associations were found between conflicted shyness and social disinterest and outcome variables. Implications for the motivational underpinnings and adjustment outcomes of shyness and social disinterest are explored.     

Identifying shared environmental contributions to early substance use: the respective roles of peers and parents

Although behavior genetic studies have suggested that early substance use is primarily environmentally mediated, no study has sought to identify the specific sources of environmental variance. Using data obtained from multiple informants, this study assessed the contributions of peer deviance and parent-child relationship problems to substance use in 14-year-old male and female twins (N = 1,403) drawn from the Minnesota Twin Family Study (MTFS). All three phenotypes were influenced primarily by shared environmental variance (average c(2) =.51), as was the overlap among them. Moreover, peer deviance and parent-child relationship problems accounted for approximately 77% of the variance in early substance use. Findings also indicated that peer deviance, but not parent-child relationship problems, accounted uniquely for variance in early substance use.     

Ethnicity, expressed emotion, attributions, and course of schizophrenia: family warmth matters

The authors examined the role of family factors and the course of schizophrenia by carrying out additional assessments and analyses in 2 previously published studies of Mexican American and Anglo American patients and families. The authors found partial support for an attributional model of relapse for families who are low in emotional overinvolvement. Attributions of control, criticism, and warmth together marginally predicted relapse. The data also indicated that for Mexican Americans, family warmth is a significant protective factor, whereas for Anglo Americans, family criticism is a significant risk factor. These findings suggest that the sociocultural context shapes the pathways by which family processes are related to the course of illness. Moreover, the warmth findings suggest that families may contribute to preventing relapse.     

Do college students drink more than their non-college-attending peers? Evidence from a population-based longitudinal female twin study

The association of college attendance with alcohol use and alcohol use disorders was examined in a population-based young adult female twin sample identified from a systematic search of birth records. College-attending women consumed a larger overall volume of alcohol than did their non-college-attending peers, but they were not more likely to be diagnosed with an alcohol use disorder. Significant associations between college attendance and alcohol involvement were probed using 3 different complementary research designs: multivariate cross-sectional analyses, longitudinal analyses of the precollege and college years, and cotwin-control analyses of twin pairs discordant for attending college. Although demographic and lifestyle characteristics accounted for most or all of the association between college attendance and alcohol involvement, there was 1 aspect of drinking behavior, occasionally consuming large quantities of alcohol, that remained significantly associated with college attendance even after controlling for these characteristics or for genetic and family background factors. These results are consistent with the conclusion that some aspect of the college experience may be an important environmental risk factor for this pattern of drinking among young adults.     

Memory accessibility, mood regulation, and dysphoria: difficulties in repairing sad mood with happy memories?

Recent studies have suggested that mood-incongruency effects are due to mood-regulatory processes, in which people retrieve positive memories to repair negative moods. In Study 1, the authors investigated whether dysphoria influences the accessibility of autobiographical memories following a positive or a negative mood induction combined with subsequent rumination or distraction. The results showed a mood-repair effect for nondysphoric but not for dysphoric participants following rumination. In Study 2, participants were asked to either distract themselves or to recall positive autobiographical memories after a negative mood induction. Whereas nondysphoric participants' mood improved under both conditions, dysphoric participants' mood improved only after distraction. These results suggest that dysphoria is associated with a reduced ability to use mood-incongruent recall to repair sad moods.