Therapists' emotional reactions to patients as a mediator in cognitive behavioural treatment of panic disorder with agoraphobia

The aims of this study were to examine whether therapists' emotional reactions to their patients mediate the effect of personality disorders and interpersonal problem behaviours on the outcome of treatment, focusing on an Axis I disorder; and whether therapists' reactions mediate the effect of personality disorders on the course of interpersonal problems. Therapists completed a checklist of emotional reactions to individual patients after the end of residential cognitive or guided mastery therapy for 46 inpatients with panic disorder with agoraphobia. The severity of DSM-III-R personality disorder was related to therapists' insecurity feelings, but not to interest and anger. A higher level of therapists' insecurity feelings was related to less reduction in self-reported agoraphobic avoidance during treatment, whereas therapists' emotions were unrelated to symptomatic course after treatment. Therapists' insecurity feelings appeared partly to mediate the relationship between patients' severity of personality disorder and persistence of patients' interpersonal dominance and nurturance problems.     

The acquisition of allophonic rules: statistical learning with linguistic constraints

Phonological rules relate surface phonetic word forms to abstract underlying forms that are stored in the lexicon. Infants must thus acquire these rules in order to infer the abstract representation of words. We implement a statistical learning algorithm for the acquisition of one type of rule, namely allophony, which introduces context-sensitive phonetic variants of phonemes. This algorithm is based on the observation that different realizations of a single phoneme typically do not appear in the same contexts (ideally, they have complementary distributions). In particular, it measures the discrepancies in context probabilities for each pair of phonetic segments. In Experiment 1, we test the algorithm's performances on a pseudo-language and show that it is robust to statistical noise due to sampling and coding errors, and to non-systematic rule application. In Experiment 2, we show that a natural corpus of semiphonetically transcribed child-directed speech in French presents a very large number of near-complementary distributions that do not correspond to existing allophonic rules. These spurious allophonic rules can be eliminated by a linguistically motivated filtering mechanism based on a phonetic representation of segments. We discuss the role of a priori linguistic knowledge in the statistical learning of phonology.     

Re-visiting the competence/performance debate in the acquisition of the counting principles

Advocates of the "continuity hypothesis" have argued that innate non-verbal counting principles guide the acquisition of the verbal count list (Gelman & Galistel, 1978). Some studies have supported this hypothesis, but others have suggested that the counting principles must be constructed anew by each child. Defenders of the continuity hypothesis have argued that the studies that failed to support it obscured children's understanding of counting by making excessive demands on their fragile counting skills. We evaluated this claim by testing two-, three-, and four-year-olds both on "easy" tasks that have supported continuity and "hard" tasks that have argued against it. A few noteworthy exceptions notwithstanding, children who failed to show that they understood counting on the hard tasks also failed on the easy tasks. Therefore, our results are consistent with a growing body of evidence that shows that the count list as a representation of the positive integers transcends pre-verbal representations of number.     

The dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective

In this paper I discuss the nature and role of dream and the dreaming process in Jungian clinical practice in the light of neuroscience. Insights from contemporary neuroscience support rather than contest Jung's view that emotional truth, not censorship or disguise, underpins the dreaming process. I use clinical material to illustrate how work with dreams within the total interactive experience of the analytic dyad enables the development of the emotional scaffolding necessary for the development of 'mind'. Large scale evidence-based research reveals that dreaming is caused by brain activity during sleep that is both biochemically and regionally different from that of waking states. Recent imaging studies confirm that dreams are the mind's vehicle for the processing of emotional states of being, particularly the fear, anxiety, anger or elation that often figure prominently. Dream sleep is understood as also being the guardian of memory, playing a part in forgetting, encoding and affective organization of memory. In the clinical section of the paper I let a series of dreams speak for themselves, revealing the emotionally salient concerns of the dreamer, weaving past and present, transference and reality together in a way that demonstrates the healthy attempt of the brain-mind to come to terms with difficult emotional experience from the past. The dreams become dreamable as part of the meaning-making process of analysis.     

An exploration of the influence of dispositional traits and appraisal on coping strategies in African American college students

This study explored the correlates of self-reported coping strategies from both an appraisal (e.g., severity, impact, desirability of the event, as well as perceived stress) and a dispositional (e.g., preferred/typical coping style, self-concept clarity, self-esteem, emotion regulation, problem-solving style, anxiety) perspective. Participants were 211 African American undergraduate and graduate students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. The results indicated that dispositional traits (especially problem-solving style) are associated uniquely with preferred/typical coping styles. The results also provided modest evidence that dispositional traits and subjects' appraisals (e.g., challenge, harm/threat, impact) are predictive of subjects' coping strategies in specific ongoing stressful situations. The general findings from this study appear to mirror research on Caucasian subjects.     

An oscillator model of the timing of turn-taking

When humans talk without conventionalized arrangements, they engage in conversation—that is, a continuous and largely nonsimultaneous exchange in which speakers take turns. Turn-taking is ubiquitous in conversation and is the normal case against which alternatives, such as interruptions, are treated as violations that warrant repair. Furthermore, turn-taking involves highly coordinated timing, including a cyclic rise and fall in the probability of initiating speech during brief silences, and involves the notable rarity, especially in two-party conversations, of two speakers’ breaking a silence at once. These phenomena, reported by conversation analysts, have been neglected by cognitive psychologists, and to date there has been no adequate cognitive explanation. Here, we propose that, during conversation, endogenous oscillators in the brains of the speaker and the listeners become mutually entrained, on the basis of the speaker’s rate of syllable production. This entrained cyclic pattern governs the potential for initiating speech at any given instant for the speaker and also for the listeners (as potential next speakers). Furthermore, the readiness functions of the listeners are counterphased with that of the speaker, minimizing the likelihood of simultaneous starts by a listener and the previous speaker. This mutual entrainment continues for a brief period when the speech stream ceases, accounting for the cyclic property of silences. This model not only captures the timing phenomena observed in the literature on conversation analysis, but also converges with findings from the literatures on phoneme timing, syllable organization, and interpersonal coordination.     

PEER MODELING OF RESPONSE CHAINS: OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING BY STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES

Peer models (classmates without disabilities) who were proficient in performing a task completed one response chain each day and described the steps they performed while their classmates with disabilities observed. Three students with disabilities participated, and their performance of the response chains was assessed immediately prior to and following the peer modeling each day. A multiple probe design across response chains, replicated across children with disabilities, was used. In addition, participation and social interactions of children with disabilities and their peer models were assessed in classroom activities after daily modeling sessions. The results indicate that the peer models performed the response chains accurately and quickly, and students with disabilities acquired the response chains. Across the study, participation in classroom activities was high, social interactions were low, and neither was affected by the peer modeling intervention.